Seth Godin is one of those disruptive gurus of marketing, publishing, and connectivity, and I think he speaks a lot of sense. I especially appreciate what he says about the book as a souvenir—with all of the ambiguity that such a word implies. Witness this comment:

A book is a physical souvenir, a concrete instantiation of your ideas in a physical object, something that gives your ideas substance and allows them to travel.

Out of context, a 140 character tweet cannot change someone’s life. A blog post might (I can think of a few that changed the way I think about business and even life). A movie can, but most big movies are inane entertainments designed to make a lot of money, not change people. But books? [. . .]

Books change lives every day. A book takes more than a few minutes to read. A book envelopes [sic] us, it is relentless in its voice and in its linearity. You start at the beginning and you either ride with the author to the end or you bail. And unlike just about any form of electronic media, you get to read the book at your own pace, absorbing it as you go.