Fascinating:

    ... China ... the first party-approved science fiction and
    fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I
    took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been
    disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

    It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making
    things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not
    innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they
    sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google,
    and they asked the people there who were inventing the future
    about themselves. And they found that all of them had read 
    science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Just an anecdote, of course, but this would be a wonderful "proper" study - to look at the correlation between early SF readers, and "makers" versus "workers".

Correlation doesn't imply causation, etc, etc, but it does suggest an interesting and intriguing possibility.

Stand-out quote for me:

"I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.

It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations."

See also the recent discussion on the possible role of literary fiction in assisting emotional insight, theory of mind, and empathy [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6545881

Much like Neil, I think that physical made-out-of-dead-tree-books are pretty fantastic devices for delivering information to our brains. But the stats for digital book take up are pretty staggering.

I don't think this means anything in itself, but coupled with the fact that more and more people are choosing to read on tablets as opposed to dedicated e-reading devices does worry me. Do tablet manufacturers care about reading? Probably not. So it's not just that books exist in a noisier world. They are also increasingly sharing a platform with noisier content.

I love reading in physical books. However, they're too bulky to carry several around for a trip, bus ride, etc...

So, I love my Kindle because it lets me carry around a ridiculous library in a small form factor.

Yet, I sometimes need to be in just my business wear, so don't have place for the Kindle, and end up reading in a smartphone.

Much like carrying around a dedicated camera has been superseded by cell phones (even though no-one can deny that dedicated cameras take superior photographs), paper books are superseded by e-book readers, tablets and smartphones, because of the convenience factor.

And, as you say, they have to compete with apps, the Internet, etc...