Hmm …

… Is Literature Dead? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… it’s not hard to make a case for Common Sense as the most important book ever published in America, but from the vantage point of the present, it raises questions that are less easily resolved. Could a book, any book, have this kind of impact in contemporary society? What about a movie or a website? Yes, the Daily Kos and FiveThirtyEight.com attracted devoted and obsessive traffic in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, but the percentages (and the effect) were nowhere near what Paine achieved. Even Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, released barely six months before the 2004 election to packed theaters and impassioned public debate, came and went in the figurative blink of an eye.

Well, if that's the sort of impact you want literature to have, literature may be better off dead.  I hope not. Maybe more people will read literature on devices rather than in books, but I think the strange and satisfying intimacy of reader and author will continue indefinitely.