Something strange happened on my way to work this morning. It happened just like this: I was reading a new book by Costas Lapavitsas called Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All, when I began to suspect that a man sitting across from me in the back of the bus was trying to make out what I was reading. But when I confirmed from the corner of my eyes that this stranger's eyes were indeed locked on and scanning the back of my book, I began to feel odd. Why feel this way? What was wrong with this situation? Was it the icy sunlight hitting his round face? Was it the bumpiness of the turn the bus was making—rotating behind me was the Douglass-Truth library? Then it suddenly dawned on me: I almost never read actual/hard books on the bus or train but instead PDF files or e-books presented on the screen on my phone (a Nexus 4). But why would this create an odd feeling in the first place? Because this kind of situation—a reader and a stranger curious about what the reader is reading—is almost completely lost with an e-book. A change in a technology (public visibility/sharing in the case of a hard book) never occurs without an unexpected gain or loss.