Remember books? They were those pieces of paper with words printed on them packed in between two, sometimes, handsome covers. People bought them, and people borrowed them, but, in any case, people used to read them. And then came screens. Six years into the furious rise of mobile, half of American adults own a smartphone; over a third own a tablet.



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Now, I'm joking about the end of books, but it's easy and tempting to project that screens will continue their onslaught on words and paper-bound books will go the way of papyrus. But if you take a hard look at the data (no matter what device you use) it's not the end of print. Not by a long shot.

Still, there hasn't been a more perfect technology for capturing the hopes, fears, and neuroses of new parents than the tablet. It's why people aged 35 to 44 have scooped up tablets faster than any other age group -- even faster than tech-savvy twentysomethings. As Hanna Rosin detailed in her Atlantic cover story, touchscreens are so intuitive that babies can use them and learn at younger ages than we thought possible -- or babies can use them and use them and use them and lose out on other skills. We just don't know what this kind of avalanche of stimuli does to young brains. All we know is we're raising a generation that, as CBS points out, sometimes finds magazines more baffling than iPads.

