Until J.D. Salinger died last month, technology news was crowding the traditional book off the page.

The death of the 91-year-old writer received major attention around the world, but, later that day, the buzz about the release of Apple's heavily promoted iPad threatened to return "The Catcher in the Rye" author to obscurity.

The latest and most sophisticated digital device to enter the electronic reader market (although it offers more "apps" than its competitors) seemed to raise the threat level yet again to the centuries-old source of knowledge and entertainment.

More significantly, the iPad further advanced the pervasive role of the computer in our lives, a role that many perceive as changing the very nature of reading itself.

John Herrman, reporter for the technology blog Gizmodo, bleated, it "makes reading on a Kindle seem about as stodgy as, you know, paper."

Kindle is Amazon's e-reader, introduced last year with the usual hoopla. It links users directly to the online bookseller, making the acquisition of books fast and easy -- from Amazon's stock, of course.

Kindle has spawned a pile of competitors creating a busy marketplace for the gizmos as well as sparking price wars for downloading books. The whole issue of price is shaking the economics of publishing right now, but it's the computer's ability to alter the reading and writing process that continues to raise concerns.

A program Thursday by the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series should bring that concern into tighter focus. It's a panel discussion called "The Future of the Book." The panelists are Sven Birkerts and Maud Newton. University of Pittsburgh writing instructor Cathy Day will moderate. Pitt is the organizer.

Ms. Newton is the creator of a blog on literary subjects, maudnewton.com/blog, started in 2002. She also contributes fiction and commentary to print publications.

Mr. Birkerts has taken the traditional writer's route, writing books and editing the literary magazine Agni. His 1995 rumination on the growing influence of the computer, "The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age," was one of the first salvos fired in the ongoing conflict.

The director of Bennington College's Writing Seminars, he continues to call himself "a skeptic, if not a downright resister" of turning paper books into a digital format.

"While the flow of new books hasn't changed, I think it's clear that the way we read has been altered by the computer screen," Mr. Birkerts said last week. "It's possible that our brains are getting rewired," he said, citing a recent "Frontline" program on PBS, "Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier," a report on how a whole generation of people are dependent on social networks and Internet usage.

"For this group, the book is a thing of the past," Mr. Birkerts said. "There's information coming to them through two, three channels at the same time. You just can't have too much stimulus."

Other observers of the digital-vs.-print conflict are discovering the same thing. In his upcoming book, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," Nicholas Carr reports:

"And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

Conversely, a book draws the reader's eye and mind to one page, a paragraph, a sentence, a single word. There is time to consider, reconsider, reflect.

In an essay in The Atlantic magazine last year, Mr. Birkerts wondered how the nature of reading might change if "the Kindle were to supplant the bound book? ... My fear is that as Wikipedia is to information, so will the Kindle become to literature and the humanities: a one-stop outlet, a speedy and irresistibly efficient leveler of context."

The panel discussion is open to the public at the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, Oakland, at 8:30 p.m. Thursday.

"Bob Hoover's Book Club" is available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.