Further adventures in death, book club edition

Lane Smith's new children’s book, It’s a Book, wants you to know it’s, um, a book. You know, the kind with pages you can flip (without the click of a mouse.) The kind generally housed on a shelf, not in an e-reader’s digital memory, that grows yellowed and dog-eared with age.

Linton Weeks at NPR uses this simple children’s story to explore a very complex and grown-up question: what is the future of the book? Linton explains why it’s adaptation or extinction for the brick-and-mortar book business, and what that means for reading, writing, and everything between two covers.

From NPR:

People have been talking about "the death of the book" for more than a decade. But recent events suggest the end may be imminent for bound-paper books as we have known them for more than 500 years. Hardbound and paperback books may never totally disappear, but they could become scary scarce — like eight-track tapes, typewriters and wooden tennis rackets.

In July, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos announced that his customers now buy more digital versions of stories — designed for Amazon's proprietary reading tablet, the Kindle — than they do hardcover books. That is an astonishing fact, Bezos said, "when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months."

The MIT futurist Nicholas Negroponte told the Techonomy Conference in early August that the physical, paper-based book is dying rapidly and will soon be replaced as the dominant form. "It’s happening," Negroponte said. "It's not happening in 10 years. It's happening in five years."