The digital age is rendering books more common, not less. It is true that there is nothing new about "furniture books": The trade in reading material has long been dwarfed by the market for coffee-table books, books that steakhouse chains buy by the yard, empty bindings that interior decorators use to accessorize the upholstery. As coffee-table volumes gather dust, reading migrates elsewhere. Once, readers came to the book: The first printed folios were chained to lecterns. Gradually, books came to readers. Gaslight let duodecimos clamber into people's beds--no more fear of the curtains catching fire. The publisher Allen Lane slipped books into people's pockets: The first Penguin paperback, in 1935, bore the same relation to a quarto that a laptop does to a desktop computer. The first audiobook cassettes were even smaller. Scholars might be library-bound, but pleasure reading could take place anywhere. Where does this leave campus libraries and faculty offices? The School of Design in the author's university plans to stud its stacks with "cold spots": metal shields blocking cellphone reception and wireless signals from carrel-like cubbies where students can curl up with a book, or even with an already-downloaded e-book. Books continue to connote stillness.