Why Books Still Matter

Bibliophiles and publishers are treated with a fair amount of suspicion. While the defence of the book does not require the trashing of digital culture, many members of the new media infotopia claim the destruction of book culture as a good and inevitable thing. Why? And what is at risk? Does the book still matter in the intellectual and cognitive evolution as a species? Is a bookless world in which people learn to read and research by virtue of snippets, tags, annotations, and wiki-research a world of people who not only won’t be able to read books but won’t be able to write them? And then does the record of human experience, several thousand years evolved, irrevocably change?