Touring around Ukraine recently, I spent more time and energy trying to read the Cyrillic alphabet than I did gawking at the endless tour of war monuments and massacre memorials. Cyrillic is full of strange signs and traps—P is R, H is N; it was as if the written language that has always been my window on the world had suddenly turned opaque. Occasionally words swam up through the mists—Internet looks a lot the same in Cyrillic; Café doesn’t, but it popped up often enough that I learned it. “Lenin” got very familiar. Other times I stared at a swarm of alien symbols, fascinated, but locked out. Illiterate.

I resigned myself to feeling stupid. I watched what other people did. Looked for universal symbols, like arrows, and anything with a big red X through it. I used sign language a lot. I smiled, and learned to say “please” and “thank you” in Ukrainian. Most of the time, I just wondered and guessed.

All the while I noticed that in bigger cities, the Roman alphabet showed up fairly often. Many of these incursions were the big international brands, McDonald’s, Piaget, Nokia. Even in desperately poor Ukraine, the main streets of bigger cities were lined with giant posters advertising the consumption of luxury.

There was also a fair amount of homespun spray-can graffiti using western letters. For the Ukrainians these letters must be as exotic as theirs are to me, and I wondered how they managed the strangeness—the R’s that were suddenly P’s, or vice versa, the N, the H. One invitation to error, a Cyrillic letter usually transliterated as kc, foxed up many a Ukrainian attempting to salt his art with the all-essential Anglo-Saxon fricative.

This confusion of alphabets is an uneasy cultural border of sorts. However much as Ukraine aspires to European-ness, it is not, yet, Western. Nor has the Western alphabet penetrated very deeply. The Roman letters that are seeping in are logos, symbols, not literature.

The literature part may never happen. The fuzzy signage in Dnepropetrovsk is another kind of border, part of a much broader worldview where the whole idea of literacy is changing. By the time Ukrainians learn the Western alphabet, there’s some chance they won’t need it, because print of all kinds is beginning to disappear.

We don’t think the same as we did ten years ago; we can’t. Therefore we don’t communicate what we think in the same way. To read and write is difficult and time-consuming, and many people never master it. Of course reading serious literature is still a sure way to project intellectual power, as President Bush attempted to exploit last summer, although the idea that he actually read L’Etranger, the Albert Camus novel about a thug who beats a hapless Arab to death, surely excites more levitas than gravitas.

A recent survey reported in Scientific American concludes that 12% of Americans can’t read at all, and 34% can’t read more than the most basic English text. That means 1 in 9 of us is going around the way I did in Ukraine, trying to remember what the word for bathroom looks like. One in 3 of us can’t find the catch in a mass mailing announcing we’ve each just won $50,000,000.

Of course these people aren’t as excluded from information as they would have been 100 years ago, say, when books were the only way to learn.

Communications technology is jumping past the printed page. Bill Gates, genius that he is, predicted the end of the old-fashioned book some time ago, with the eBook taking its place.

In the summer of 2006 the eBook has finally appeared and it costs $350. The books themselves must be paid for separately at bookstore prices. The chief selling point of the Sony Reader is that its screen replicates an actual printed page—black type on white paper. In other words, it’s as good as a book.

New printed books may become a thing of the past; most of the books being sold on the Internet are used. But people probably won’t exchange the excellent technology of the printed book for a clunky handheld computer that still makes them read text. Instead, we’re plugging in our iPods, and downloading books, magazines, newspapers, whatever we want, so we can listen to it. Instead of being stuck in a chair, eyes glued to a book, we read while driving, or mopping the floor, or folding the diapers.

This is surely a blessing. People are rediscovering the experience of being read to, one of the great fundamental joys. Listening to someone read to you is like falling in love. The better the voice, the more you surrender to its embrace; think of listening to Dylan Thomas read A Child’s Christmas in Wales, how the soft, confidential, sweetly accented voice somehow felt like snow falling all around. And for people who read poorly, or not at all, listening to a book opens worlds they could not otherwise reach.

The popular culture, the vast exhalations of the yearnings of the masses, is not interested in text. The lifeblood of that culture is music, which sometimes bypasses language entirely (in the case of rap, you can wish it would bypass language more often). Television has never relied on literacy; this medium, the greatest mass communications system ever designed, works almost entirely in the visual and the audible. What text appears, like logos, is symbolic rather than interpretative. (Contrast early silent movies that interposed text like a Greek chorus.) Advertising has always been visual: a car on wet pavement and a logo.

There are other signs of the loss of interest in print. The standard has dropped precipitously for public text. Proofreading in magazines, books, newspapers, used to be rigorous; now typos appear routinely in the best publications and on national television. The insidious evil of the spell-checker salts paragraphs with entertaining corruptions. People are given “free rain” and play “base guitars.” The proofreader in a local newspaper recently deeply mortified a friend of mine (a member of Mensa, the High IQ Club, and an endurance rider) when he amended a quotation from her to read “the rapport between my horse and I.” We’ve come a long way baby from “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should;” in the 1950s that caused an uproar of grammatical indignation, but now errors don’t even jar people’s attention.