Don't Read the Last Rites for Hardbacks Just Yet

On the readers' highway through the world of books, next to stunning vistas of the imagination, you also pass the burnt-out wrecks of shiny new predictions. For instance: no one but a blockhead publishes sci-fi. Novels are dead; film is the future. Ink is for antiquarians; the paperless society has arrived. Etc. This new century has seen a boom in prototypes for a brave new world.

The decade since the millennium has sponsored a spike in anxieties about a viable literary culture.