1. Books are more analogous to vinyl than they are to CD's. People think they're cool, they like having bookshelves. In the age of screens, having something physical that you can set on a coffee table is refreshing.

Print might be more niche, but it will no go anywhere in our lifetimes.

2. It assumes that digital reading experiences are inherently the way we see them right now.

I can't for the life of me read anything lengthy on my phone, but I'll tear through thick old books on Kindle.

A big part of that is the kindle screen will show almost the same number of words as a printed page.

My iPhone shows less than half of that. Paragraphs that read smoothly in print or E-ink devices don't even fit on the screen. Social posts and tiny snippets fit well. Throw in some notifications and why would anyone be able to stay undistracted while using a phone?

The more I look at these things the less it looks like something inherent to print and digital and more like a collection of design decisions and consequences on what happens in the screens, not the screen themselves.

Some other things that strike me: I agree that a phone or iPad isn't much good for reading a novel, but I love reading on my Kindle (and the built-in dictionary makes it easier to approach foreign-language works, although I still don't do this as often as I feel I ought to).

The idea that books have to compete with more stimulating technologies isn't new either: radio, movies, and TV were there first. Is this a wholly new trend or the acceleration of an existing one?

The distraction of always-on Internet is certainly real, though, and exacerbated by smartphones. And it is striking that even journalists and political leaders often don't seem very well-read, particularly when you go back and look at 19th-Century rhetoric rife with allusions to the Bible or Greek myth that are opaque to much of the modern audience.

Well, 4-5 decades ago ago he was for US mainstream literature world what Led Zeppelin were for 70s hard rock fans...

So, the essay author explains very well why he asked the question: to show the very short span of literary glory, from someone who was ubiquitous and celebrated not long ago.

He also adds, when 2 out of 300 raise a hand: "Frankly I was surprised it was that many".

Half a century or so ago, and for a long time before that, people didn't just chose from "thousands of years' worth of literature from all over the world" -- they knew the authors of their time, and the times before, with many overlaps that formed a canon, not a free choice among thousands of works (if that, since many don't read that much, period).

>The idea that books have to compete with more stimulating technologies isn't new either: radio, movies, and TV were there first. Is this a wholly new trend or the acceleration of an existing one?

Does it matter? Both are comparatively recent -- there are people alive in the US who were born when none of them (radio, tv) were available at any home.

TV is also shallowly based on technical quality (people wont see black and white shows etc), whereas the written word on paper is a stable technology for centuries, if not millennia.

Arguably that's less the case than it used to be insofar as you can get your hands on many older TV shows if you want to.

That said, TV--and, especially, historic network TV--is a lot more rooted in its time and place than a lot of writing is. It's partly for technical reasons as you say. The production values of a lot of older shows are going to be a distraction even if the content were otherwise modern. But TV shows also tend to reflect (to an arguably greater degree than the typical film) the period in which they were made. Not just the look but a lot of the sensibilities.

I'd wager than there are very few TV shows dating to the 1970s and before that are really watchable today whereas there are plenty of films going back to almost the beginning of "talkies." (There are some good silent films too but obviously those have to be approached with a somewhat different mindset.)

There are some exceptions. For example, episodes of The Twilight Zone or a series like MAS*H can still be appreciated, but for the most part, no. (ADDED: For example, All in the Family was a groundbreaking show when it aired. But, although I haven't seen an episode in years, I'm willing to bet it would come across as very much a period piece today.)

One, books are no less a voguish medium than television or films; it's not just a coincidence that a bunch of people read Mailer at the same time, or that the best-seller list is mostly books that have gotten a lot of buzz recently, rather than timeless literary classics. Additionally, older books can be difficult to new audiences because of style (consider ancient books' long lists of genealogies, or their elliptical style, or consider the long-windedness of 19th-Century writing -- both can put readers off).

Further, the popularity of TV or movies is not solely determined by technical quality. Fewer people are watching shows that are a few years old now, or people are rediscovering 90s TV because it's added to Netflix and has a second wind. Consider also music. There's little technical reason to choose between Carrie Underwood or Loretta Lynn; both are easily available in high-fidelity digital format. Yet more people choose to listen to one than the other.

Books and tv series or movies have totally different tails of sales vs recentness.

Movies are mostly front-loaded (more recent = more views), tv series are almost totally front-loaded (some might watch 10 or 20 year old series, but not many will watch a 40 or 50 year old one, whereas for movies people do it more often).

Books, of course, are far more unrelated with recentness. There are books that are well read even today that are out of millennia, and anybody who considers themselves a literature reader has read works from the 20th and 19th century, and many from earlier times too.

    the literary novel ha[s] quit center stage of our culture and [is] in the process, 
    via university creative writing programs, of becoming a conservatory form, 
    like the easel painting or the symphony.

    Among genres long since completed and in part already dead, the novel is the only developing 
    genre. It is the only genre that was born and nourished in a new era of world history and  
    therefore it is deeply akin to that era, whereas the other major genres entered that era as 
    already fixed forms, as an inheritance, and only now are they adapting themselves-some 
    better, some worse-to the new conditions of their existence. Compared with them, the novel 
    appears to be a creature from an alien species. It gets on poorly with other genres. It 
    fights for its own hegemony in literature; wherever it triumphs, the other older genres go 
    into decline.
    ...
    The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the 
    conven­tionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and 
    incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, re­-formulating and re-accentuating them...
    Those genres that stubbornly preserve their old canonic nature begin to appear stylized...
    Parodic stylizations of canonized genres and styles occupy an essential place in the novel...
    What are the salient features of this novelization of other genres suggested by us above?
    They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary 
    heteroglos­sia and the "novelistic" layers of literary language, they become dialogized, 
    permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally-this is the most important thing-
    the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, 
    a living contact with unfinished, still­ evolving contemporary reality (the openended present).

"In March, I gave an interview to the Guardian in which I repeated my usual—and unwelcome—assertion that the literary novel had quit center stage of our culture and was in the process, via university creative writing programs, of becoming a conservatory form, like the easel painting or the symphony."

Hard to say. Various authors role out big literary novels at their pace: Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen come to mind, and they get respectable reviews.

"Furthermore, I fingered ­BDDM as responsible for this transformation, the literary novel being simply the canary forced to flee this particular mine shaft first."

I don't think that the RSPCA made it to the coal mines back then.

At the moment, I'm a bit too BDDMed to follow the argument all the way, though.

> "I referred above to “bidirectional digital media,” by which I mean the suite of technologies that comprises the wireless-connected computer, handheld or otherwise, the World Wide Web, and the internet. Henceforth I’ll abbreviate this term to BDDM."

I feel an issue behind this essay is that it makes assumptions of the purpose of literature. That literature should be difficult to read, and that difficult works are the only works that transfer knowledge, is not reflected in contemporary understanding of literature... anywhere. Although there are essays discussing the merit of difficult literature, they have always been in response to an equal or greater number of essays denigrating difficult literature.

I began to lose faith in the power of my own imagination, and realized, further, that to look at objects on a screen and then describe them was, in a very important sense, to abandon literature, if by this is understood an art form whose substrate is words alone.

This isn't true either. Literature has not (perhaps never been) purely a substrate of words. For much of history literature involved pictures, diagrams, spoken word. One only needs to look at modern mixed-media poetry to see that literature does not rely only on words. It is traditionally viewed this way but this view doesn't reflect the reality of literature.

And then we cleave to this new intimacy, one shorn of all the contingencies of sex, race, class, and nationality.

This isn't true either. Lots of literature is written involving the above, including many of the works referenced here. Even writing about this is its own contingency of nationality, as it heavily references national statistics of only one nation.

Moreover, the determination to effect cultural change—by the imposition of diversity quotas—is itself an indication of printed paper’s looming redundancy.

Diversity quotas the way the author is referencing here either don't exist of have always existed in the form of "women's literature" (a term itself having undergone controversy long before technology's prime). Discussing diversity in literature must also acknowledge that women have always been writing. In fact, throughout the years, women have been a good number of contemporary bestsellers in their time. The only discussion would then be to discuss why women's literature are only rarely considered literature as relevant to the culture from which the literature is produced- but this discussion has been ongoing long before technology's time! An example is right in this essay, in which JK Rowling's Harry Potter series is simultaneously a cultural phenomenon and worth no literary merit whatsoever (described as "kidult")! In short, I don't think this point is relevant at all to technology.

It was only when finishing this essay that I fully admitted to myself what I’d done: created yet another text that’s an analysis of our emerging ­BDDM life but that paradoxically requires the most sophisticated pre-BDDM reading skills to fully appreciate it.

With all due frankness (and my degree in English literature) this attitude of requiring sophistication in communication as fundamentally superior communication (as stated multiple times in his rhetoric) is not an established case. This essay should be read as an opinion of one guy on the state of literature and not the reflection of literature as a whole- and likely not even reflecting contemporary established academic views on this matter.

"Literature" in the sense he's using it doesn't refer to every work of fiction. I don't know that literature has to be challenging to be good (A Farewell to Arms is pretty universally recognized and it isn't long or difficult), but an audience that reflexively gravitates only toward YA novels is demonstrating a certain lack of desire for thinking. The number of political takes I read that involve analogy to a children's book about wizards is somewhat hard to look at without thinking that our current literary environment engenders a lack of critical thinking.

I don't know that women's literature has "always" been respected; why did Emily Bronte (among many other Victorian woman authors) write under a male pseudonym?

Your claim is valid, but we should take into account that cutting trees and planting new ones is not the same a leaving the trees alone in term of ecosystem. Just like burning down an old town an rebuilding a new one is not neutral in term of things lost.