Art & Creativity Quote by Walter Jon Williams

A good reading device, Walter Jon Williams argues, should be treated less like a shrine and more like a paperback: abused, dropped, dampened, forgotten in a tote bag. That bath-and-beach image is doing real rhetorical work. It’s not just about portability; it’s about permission. Books and magazines are culturally coded as intimate, low-stakes companions. You can bend the spine, skim, reread a paragraph with shampoo in your hair. By invoking those settings, Williams quietly indicts platforms that demand reverence: the fragile laptop, the precious gadget, the screen that’s always one notification away from yanking you back to “productivity.”

The intent is practical, but the subtext is ideological. He’s staking out a definition of “platform” that privileges resilience and autonomy over novelty. In the era of cloud-locked ecosystems, he’s essentially asking for ownership that feels physical: something that keeps working when Wi-Fi doesn’t, that doesn’t guilt-trip you with updates, that won’t punish you for treating culture like leisure.

Context matters: Williams is a working genre novelist who came up alongside multiple waves of digital evangelism, from early e-books to app-based “content.” Writers like him have watched stories migrate onto devices optimized for everything except sustained attention. So this line doubles as a design brief and a cultural critique: if reading is to survive as a habit, it can’t require a clean room. It has to fit back into the messy, wet, sunburned parts of ordinary life.