From the link, eBooks will never be our friends, the argument is made: The books of all time will remain on paper, but those of the hour will increasingly be digital: the airport novel, the reference book, the celebrity memoir. A personal library will no longer be the repository of unread paperbacks, but a genuine index to individuality, as it was in the days when books were rare and precious.
This is intriguing because those with limited space, such as your correspondent, only keep books for work but doesn’t keep a PC, only a memory stick. The coming generations, conditioned to cellphone screens will forgo the traditional book altogether, just as CDs and albums have been forsaken for MP3 files.
As for when everyone’s an author, there may be a proliferation of bad unread books, if there isn’t already. It is a writer’s duty to wade through the first several bad books to write maybe a decent novel or two. If the academy should abandon traditional literature literature programs for creative writing is the ultimate triumph of Maoist-type-Cultural-Revolution thought and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This writer has benefited from reading Faulkner and Hemingway and would have never read Beowulf or MacBeth unless it was required in high school. Knowledge is power and it is important for any artist to know what has been done to be capable of true creation, the best kind of art.

Shouldn’t you be reading Ulysses instead of surfing the internet?

seriously, we can deduce that literary prizes are completely worthless by virtue of the fact that someone gave one to ‘on beauty’.

also, i would have read macbeth anyway.

Well said, Warren Weappa.