Excerpt: Bruce McCall’s 50 Things to Do with a Book

From Bruce McCall Vanity Fair

Hotel rooms now provide Gideon Bibles only as pay-per-view TV channels. Librarians recently thrown out of work are forced to take jobs assembling Kindles. The Cassandra Report forecasts that more than fifty warehouses across the U.S., long used as book storage and shipping centers, will shortly be converted to video-game facilities. Rare-book collectors are switching to classic Betamax movie videos of the 1970s and 1980s.

Dire omens indeed, in line with a recent survey that found that more than half of all Americans didn’t read a single book in the previous year—doubtless a conservative figure, because everybody lies about their reading habits. The trend toward a bookless society is gaining almost daily as a TV-besotted, iPhone-bedazzled, time-starved, speed-crazed populace becomes ever less willing to seek information and entertainment by concentrating their minds on endless lines of type.

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