Today, no bigger bait and switch exists than what parents do when they read aloud to a baby. Hook your darling on books by associating reading with snuggles, only to plunge him or her into a lifetime of tête-à-têtes with books. For most of human history, though, adults got read aloud to too. Scholars debate how representative of fourth-century readers St. Augustine was when he reported his shock at seeing another reader staring at a page but making no sound. Even once the new convention of inserting spaces between words (ratherthanrunningthemtogetherlikethis) allowed readers to parse text without having to sound it out syllable by syllable, medieval readers continued to move their mouths, as children do today. Nilo Cruz’s play Anna in the Tropics reminds us that workers in Cuban cigar factories routinely paid a “lector” to read aloud to them: Montecristo cigars honored the Dumas novel that they heard over the course of weeks and months.

My own story has that most bookish of structures, a happy ending. An occupational therapist taught me to sit on a three-ring binder with one foot propped on a book. For the yellow pages pictured in her yellowing diagrams, I substituted an outdated Microsoft manual. Now that abdominal curls have unscrolled my spine, I can finally curl up with a good book. Or, at least, with WebMD.com.

I learned something more basic, though, that no ergonomics textbook could have taught me. The occupational therapist also coached me to stop aiming for the perfect posture that girls once learned by balancing books on their heads. Instead, she taught me to be flexible. Readers can likewise learn when to read in print and when to opt for digital, when to read quickly and when to read slowly, when to search an encyclopedia and when to have their souls searched by a poem.