IS IT THE END FOR BOOKS?

This story appears today in the New Zealand Herald "The Business" weekly supplement. It was originally published in current issue The Economist under the heading " the future of books - not bound by anything".

The artwork above, by Daniel Pudles, is also from The Economist.

Use this link to read the whole story but take solace from the final paragraph which reads as follows:

....... anthologies of short stories and poems, like longer novels, are
unlikely to disappear. People want to be guided by others. They also want media suitable for unhurried reading in beds and bathtubs and on beaches. Above all, they want paper books for what digitisation is revealing them to be. Books are not primary artefacts, nor necessarily vehicles for ideas. Rather, as Godin puts it, they are "souvenirs on the way we felt" when we read something. That is
something people are likely to go on buying.