Yet another discussion on the future of books

In the comment stream on my post last Saturday, I tried to make a point that has been, I hope, a consistent theme of this blog, to wit: Asserting an argument that favors one’s narrow self-interest and doing so loudly enough to drown out other points of view tends to lead to bad outcomes. Society functions better if people consider others’ interests in addition to their own and try to design a solution that meets everyone’s needs. I don’t think this is a particularly controversial viewpoint; I just think it’s one that, in the age of talk radio, many people have lost touch with.

In the interest of airing points of view different from my own, I now link to this post from Frank Wilson (a man who, as a long-time book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer, suckled at the teat of large publishing companies for many years), in which he comments favorably on the idea that perhaps the book is dead, after all. But please do follow the link trail from Wilson’s post to Patrick Kurp’s comments and thence to Adam Kirsch’s review in Slate. Interesting reading, all of it.