The novel is dead (this time it's for real) | Books | The Guardian

There is now an almost ceaseless murmuring about the future of narrative prose. Most of it is at once Panglossian and melioristic: yes, experts assert, there's no disputing the impact of digitised text on the whole culture of the codex; fewer paper books are being sold, newspapers fold, bookshops continue to close, libraries as well. But - but, well, there's still no substitute for the experience of close reading as we've come to understand and appreciate it - the capacity to imagine entire worlds from parsing a few lines of text; the ability to achieve deep and meditative levels of absorption in others' psyches. This circling of the wagons comes with a number of public-spirited campaigns: children are given free books; book bags are distributed with slogans on them urging readers to put books in them; books are hymned for their physical attributes -  their heft, their appearance, their smell - as if they were the bodily correlates of all those Gutenberg minds, which, of course, they are.