Here is a thoughtful, well-written piece from the Columbia Journalism Review on the history of book reviews in the US, the digital shift, anti-intellectualism in American newsrooms and much more. Too bad the people who most need to read this will find it too long. Here's a teaser:

And the book itself—compact, portable, sensuous—has yet to be bested as our most important information-retrieval system. Even Bill Gates, that Yoda of the virtual world, has been unable to resist its seductions. When, in 1996, he wanted to tell us about “The Road Ahead,” to commit the vision thing, what did he do? He had the Viking Press publish his book. He did not post his Delphic pronunciamentos on his Microsoft site. For Gates knew then—as he knows now, despite his recent insistence that the digital future will carry the day—that the book still retains the patina of authority that only time and tradition can bestow.