Can you concentrate on Flaubert when Facebook is only a swipe away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy while Twitter beckons?2

People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.3

E-mail lurks tantalizingly within reach.4 Looking up a tricky5 word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.6

That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity.7 And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled e-books have come away with a conclusion: Its harder than ever to sit down and focus on reading.

“Its like trying to cook when there are little children around,”said David Myers, 53, a systems administrator in Atlanta.8 “A child might do something silly and youve got to stop cooking and fix the problem and then return to cooking. These apps9 beg you to review them all the time,” he said.

For book publishers, who have already seen many consumers convert from print books to e-readers, the rise of tablets poses a potential danger: that book buyers may switch to tablets and then discover that they just arent very amenable to reading.10

Will those readers gradually drift away from books, letting movies or the Internet occupy their leisure time instead?

Maja Thomas, the senior vice president for Hachette Digital, part of the Hachette Book Group, hopes just the opposite occurs. “Someone who doesnt have a habit of reading, and buys a tablet, is going to be offered all these opportunities for reading,” Ms. Thomas said, noting that tablets tend to come with at least one e-book app. “Were hoping they will grow the number of people who will read.”

But there are signs that publishers are cooling11 on tablets for e-reading. A recent survey by Forrester Research showed that 31 percent of publishers believed iPads and similar tablets were the ideal e-reading platform; one year ago, 46 percent thought so.

“The tablet is like a temptress12,” said James McQuivey, the Forrester Research analyst who led the survey. “Its constantly saying, ‘You could be on YouTube13 now. Or its sending constant alerts that pop up14, saying you just got an e-mail. Reading itself is trying to compete.”

Indeed, the basic menu for the Kindle Fire offers links to video, apps, the Web, music, newsstand and books, effectively making books just another menu option. So too with the multipurpose iPad, which Allison Kutz, a 21-year-old senior at Elon University in North Carolina, bought in 2010. She says her reading experience has not been the same since.

She is constantly fending off15 the urge to check other media, making it tough to finish books. For example, in late September 2010, she bought Breaking Night, a memoir about a homeless girl turned Harvard student.16 Ms. Kutz said the only time she was able to focus on it was on an airplane because there was no Internet access. “Ive tried to sit down and read it in Starbucks17 or the apartment, but I end up on Facebook or Googling something she said, and then the next thing you know Ive been surfing18 for 25 minutes,” Ms. Kutz said.

Many publishers believe that the market for both print books and black-and-white e-readers is not going away, despite the pull of tablets.

Voracious book buyers were the first people to latch onto e-readers, prizing them for their convenience, portability and features like text zooming that made it easier for older people to read.19 Now those e-readers are lighter, sleeker20 and cost less than$100—even a cheap tablet is more than double the cost—so techshy consumers who want a device just for reading books and not much else have little incentive to upgrade.21 As long as e-readers remain significantly less expensive than tablets, there may be a market for them for a long time.

For Erin Faulk, a 29-year-old legal assistant and voracious reader in Los Angeles, the era of e-readers has had one major effect: she has accumulated many more books that she categorizes as “DNFs”—Did Not Finish. But she is also buying more books, she said, and she thinks that all the interruptions have, in a way, made her a more discerning22 reader. “With so many distractions, my taste in books has really leveled up23,” Ms. Faulk said.“Recently, I gravitate24 to books that make me forget I have a world of entertainment at my fingertips. If the books not good enough to do that, I guess my time is better spent.”

1. tablet: 文中指平板電腦。

2. 如果Facebook觸手可及，你還能專(zhuān)心于福樓拜嗎？如果Twitter在一旁召喚，你還會(huì)鐘情于達(dá)西先生嗎？Flaubert: 福樓拜（1821—1880），法國(guó)作家，認(rèn)為藝術(shù)應(yīng)該反映現(xiàn)實(shí)生活并揭露社會(huì)的丑惡現(xiàn)象，重視對(duì)生活的觀察，強(qiáng)調(diào)形式美，代表作為長(zhǎng)篇小說(shuō)《包法利夫人》；Facebook:“臉譜”網(wǎng)站，美國(guó)著名的社交服務(wù)網(wǎng)站，創(chuàng)始人是馬克·扎克伯格；Mr. Darcy: 達(dá)西先生，簡(jiǎn)·奧斯汀的代表作《傲慢與偏見(jiàn)》的男主角；Twitter: 推特，美國(guó)的一個(gè)社交網(wǎng)絡(luò)及微博客服務(wù)網(wǎng)站。

3. iPad: 蘋(píng)果公司發(fā)布的一款平板電腦，提供瀏覽互聯(lián)網(wǎng)、收發(fā)電子郵件、觀看電子書(shū)、播放音頻或視頻等功能；Kindle: Amazon推出的電子閱讀器，屏幕使用了電子墨水屏（electronic paper），使其閱讀如同看紙張一般，下文的Kindle Fire是Amazon發(fā)布的平板電腦；fragment: v.（使）成碎片，打碎；track: 方向，路徑。

4. lurk: 潛伏；tantalizingly: 撩撥人地。

5. tricky: 棘手的。

6. 而如果一本書(shū)開(kāi)始看不下去的時(shí)候，扔下書(shū)本在Netflix下一部電影，或?yàn)g覽Twitter的信息，只需要點(diǎn)幾下屏幕。

7. cacophony: 不和諧的聲音；solitary: 單獨(dú)的。

8. system administrator: 系統(tǒng)管理員；Atlanta: 亞特蘭大（美國(guó)佐治亞州首府）。

9. app: 計(jì)算機(jī)應(yīng)用程序。

10. convert: 轉(zhuǎn)變；amenable: 易接受指導(dǎo)的。

11. cool: v.（感情、情緒或關(guān)系）冷下來(lái)，變淡。

12. temptress: 勾引人的女子。

13. YouTube: 全球最大的視頻分享網(wǎng)站，公司總部位于加利福尼亞州，網(wǎng)站允許用戶(hù)下載、觀看及分享影片或短片。

14. pop up: 突然出現(xiàn)。

15. fend off: 擋開(kāi)。

16. memoir: 回憶錄；Harvard:（美國(guó)）哈佛大學(xué)。

17. Starbucks: 星巴克，美國(guó)一家連鎖咖啡公司的名稱(chēng)，1971年成立，現(xiàn)為全球最大的咖啡連鎖店。

18. surf: 網(wǎng)上沖浪，瀏覽因特網(wǎng)。

19. 如饑似渴的買(mǎi)書(shū)者們是第一批購(gòu)買(mǎi)電子閱讀器的人群，他們稱(chēng)贊電子閱讀器方便、可隨身攜帶以及諸如字體放大等功能讓老年人的閱讀更輕松。

20. sleek: 造型優(yōu)美的。

21. tech-shy: 不喜歡高科技的；incentive:動(dòng)力。

22. discerning: 有洞察力的。

23. level up: 提升。

24. gravitate: 被吸引到。