Increasingly, these will be found on quickly scanned web pages, in chat rooms, and on repeatedly forwarded bits of e-mail. The university used be the very heart of book culture, promoting reading, studying, fervently discussing, and of course much of the writing. But current American university admissions policies now actually work against taking books seriously, because getting into the better colleges requires a list of accomplishments that do not include the supposedly passive act of reading. Their attitudes are mirrored by many others, who regard serious reading as an increasingly quirky way to waste time. And they are not wrong in this estimation.
Serious reading is quirky.
You are most likely to be fully attentive to an author who connects most strongly with whom you feel yourself most deeply to be, that is who seems most fully attentive to you. But these other media do compete for attention with true books, and not to pay attention to them is a path to social and cultural isolation. So it may well be that soon reading serious books will simply drop off the radar screen of worthwhile pursuits. If we take the historical long view, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by this state of affairs. The book, as we know it today, by a single author conveying organized thoughts on a single theme has been around as a fixed form only since sometime in the seventeenth century, and really took firm hold still more recently, in the 19th c., only a short time ago relative to a few thousand years of recorded history.