Wither the book?

Are we closing the book on books? Is reading "over?" Johann Hari, a British writer and book-lover, wonders. "Ask me to throw away a book, and I begin shaking like Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice," he writes. "The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks ... And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all." Hari notes that T.S. Eliot called books "the still point of the turning world". He agrees: "It turns out, in the age of super-speed broadband, we need dead trees to have fully living minds." He's right, of course. But try selling that idea to the kids.