"Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority."

I’m guilty as charged. (From this NYT article about the Christian Science Monitor’s announcement that, after more than 100 years, it will cease publishing a daily paper. It’s only going to get worse from here.)

At Frankfurt, Many Say Digital Will Take Over Print Books by 2018 →

Reading between the lines here, it looks like the Internet is making certain types of books obsolete. BUT (and this is a big deal) not everything.

While 39 percent of respondents agreed that online bookselling was the most important industry development in the 60-year history of the fair, some 25 percent forecasted that the traditional retail bookseller would be obsolete in the next 60 years; the literary agent (21%) and the editor (14 per cent) also were said to be facing a slow demise.

See, the doom-and-gloom forgets that people don’t buy book solely for reading. A book is a device for transferring information, sure — just like a newspaper, and those have been facing some issues of their own lately. So perhaps the Scott McClellan expose-type books will be going away for good. But on the other hand, certain categories of books are bought just as much for their physical existence as objects as they are for the information they contain. And those books won’t be going away. We may not have bookstores, but we will have coffee table books, cookbooks, and big honking literary novels. Trust me.