A while back I sort of tentatively stopped paying a lot of attention to speculations about the death/future/transformation/supersession of the book and the publishing business. They were interfering with my ability to concentrate on the actual task of getting stuff written, and such speculations were largely being made by pundits who knew little, or nothing, more than the rest of us, but who had a career interest in being seen as prophetic. For a long time, the truth, it seemed to me, was that there were no real clear indicators about this; that the proverbial dust, far from having settled, was very much whipping around in the air.

Something was certainly going to change, but we couldn’t be sure what or how.

More recently, some actual developments have perhaps emerged; maybe we can begin to see something like the shape of what might be next. This piece in the New Yorker is an interesting look at what a certain computer manufacturer’s entry into the arena might mean.