I was thinking last night about books and why I don’t read them anyone — I was a lit major in college, and used to be voracious book reader. What happened?

It seems that everything that can command consumer attention — websites, software applications, social networking, video games, reality TV — is being monetized through advertising. So why not books? Especially in dynamic digital formats? Tim O’Reilly argues no:

Print is dead and all content wants to be free — two bogeymen of the digital age, with some edge of truth, but based on current visibility, still unlikely at those extremes. But it’s undeniable that the economics of print publishing are very different today than what they were before the web, and more content […]

I was in Borders Books today looking for a copy of David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous, and it suddenly struck me how ironic it was to be looking for a book about dynamic connectedness in this place of static, disconnected objects and finite shelf space.

I used to love bookstores — they were magical places […]

I’ve spent a lot of time on Publishing 2.0 talking about the impact of digital media on periodical publishing, i.e. newspapers and magazines, and about online publishing broadly defined, e.g. search results as a form of publishing, that I’ve only rarely looked at the publishing form that gave birth to modern publishing — the book. […]