Cory Doctorow has an interesting take on this in his article
Why Publishing Should Send Fruit-Baskets to Google, about the Google book-scanning debate.
Quote:
This all comes down to obscurity versus visibility. There was a time when there was a giant market for books as social tools -- read the right book and find people who shared your values, whether that was the guy on the subway with the Dungeon Master's Guide, your hippie co-worker with The Celestine Prophecy, or the latest smartypants volume lauded in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement.
Less and less so every day, though. If there's one thing the Internet is good at, it's connecting people with comparable interests: if you're a Civil War re-creator with a penchant for extreme knitting and left-of-center liberal political beliefs, you can be sure that somewhere on the net there's a group of people waiting to welcome you in. These days, science fiction fans can find all the camaraderie and fellow-feeling of sf without having to do all that tedious reading -- that's why at a con I attended a couple years ago, the two big-name authors on the ticket drew six people, while the guys who made the hilarious video-game-based cartoon Red Vs Blue had a full house.
It was once true that reading was a good way to get some light entertainment -- whether you were stuck on a train or in your living-room, a lightweight novel was just the thing to tick the hours away. But here again, the Internet, video-games and the mobile phone are hugely disruptive. Any overland commuter train has is dominated by phone-conversations, with readers in an ever-dwindling minority.
It's easy to see why: content isn't king; conversation is. If you had the choice of bringing your friends or your books to a desert island, we'd call you a sociopath if you took the books over the breathing humans.
Between vegetative media like TV that leaves your hands free to eat and IM and knit and cook dinner and conversational media like IM and multiplayer games and phones, books are a big loser in the field of providing empty entertainment in the dull moments.
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Doctorow goes on to point out that Google's Book Search puts books in front of readers again, which he says is a Good Thing. I'm inclined to agree with him. Books may have much stiffer competition these days, but those same distractions could, conversely, end up directing people back toward books, IF the books can be as easy to access as other internet content.
Which brings us back to e-books, again, of course.
