a long overdue conversation about books

Thank you, Jeff Jarvis, book lover

In any bookstore, I could seek out Dickens or Kafka if it’s anger, cynicism, absurdity, or profundity that I want.
But I have always liked reading the new, the latest, the fresh.

for starting the needed conversation:

The problems with books are many: 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. As David Weinberger taught me, they limit how knowledge can be found because they have to sit on a shelf under one address; there’s only way way to get to it. 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. Print is where words go to die.

And for continuing it:

Books do create conversations in our day and age. But most of them aren’t on the Internet. Ever heard of a book group?
They conversations are not on the internet because the book are not; there’s no permalink to act as a hub for that conversation. That’s what I want to see.

Hear, hear. And, no, it doesn’t mean the end of this:

Sheesh.