The printed books being sold are not the sort of difficult reading that spearheads knowledge transfer but picture books, kidult novels like the Harry Potter series, and, in the case of my own UK publisher at least, a great tranche of spin-off books by so-called vloggers (a development Marshall ­McLuhan anticipated when he noted that new media always cannibalize the forms of the past).

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.