Always the Eeyores, predicting the end

Humanities:

Reading always seems to be in crisis. Two and half millennia ago, Socrates inveighed against the written word because it undermined memory and confused data with wisdom. When the codex—the bound book—appeared, some conservative Romans almost certainly went around complaining, ‘What was wrong with scrolls? They were good enough for Horace and Cicero.’ Gutenberg’s press gradually undercut the market for illuminated manuscripts. Aldus Manutius, inventor of the pocket-sized book, rendered huge folios a specialty item. 

To skip ahead a few centuries, the Fourdrinier papermaking machine and other industrial-age innovations helped democratize books and periodicals by making their production faster and cheaper. Three-volume Victorian novels flourished as a staple of the rental library—until railroads came along and passengers sought shorter, more portable light fiction for their now daily commutes. For half the twentieth century, the Book of the Month Club transformed reading into a mail-order business: No longer did you need to visit a store to acquire the latest best-seller. Since the 1930s, mass-market paperbacks have extended the life of popular hardcovers and resurrected older masterpieces: What Baby Boomer doesn’t remember the clean, elegant feel of Signet Books, the distinctive design of Penguin Classics?