RajAT commented on an earlier posting here (27 May) that:

'The most connected country in the world that is Korea is spending least time reading books. Now there lies the juice. Does this mean that internet is going to kill the books as we know. Has it become an outmoded means of communicating information.'

He goes on to quote from Jeff Jarvis of the Buzz Machine about some of the problems with books:

• They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected.
• They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources.
• They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader.
• They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors.
• They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books.
• They are expensive to produce.
• They depend on scarce shelf space.
• They depend on blockbuster economics.
• They can’t afford to serve the real mass of niches.
• They are subject to gatekeepers’ whims.
• They aren’t searchable.
• They aren’t linkable.
• They have no metadata.
• They carry no conversation.
• They are thrown out when there’s no space for them anymore.

Of course there are plenty of positives about books. We'd better make sure our marketplace understands - or we'd better address some of the book's shortcomings using technology.