When billionaire hedge fund manager Steven Cohen came under scrutiny in an insider trading scandal this summer his lawyers provided a novel defense: they claimed that although he received an email that contained the incriminating information, he never actually read it.

I laughed out loud when I heard that. And then I thought about my own inbox teeming with unread messages. And I remembered my ever-growing archive of half-read ones conveniently banished to “the cloud.” I’m relatively sure that there’s nothing potentially incriminating up there, but as the cloud expands to include more and more gigabytes, I have a mounting anxiety that something essential might have slipped past me unnoticed.

Experts estimate that as many as 100,000 words now pass by our eyes and ears each day (for comparison, the complete text of Paradise Lost is only 80,000 words). “Sharing” is the buzzword of our age in which nearly all of what we read can be linked to, tweeted, emailed, attached, and downloaded within seconds. Mass digitization projects like Google Books and the Digital Public Library of America place more words within our grasp each hour, and meanwhile we continue to hear reports that nearly a third of Americans did not read as much as one book in the past year. [Read more over at the Curator]