Books- The Last Chapter ?.

At the moment we live in the golden age of information.Massive amounts of books which would have been out of print or hard to find are either available online or ordered online if only available in a printed edition.It is truly a wonderful time to be alive if you are a bibliophile.Back in the 1960s Marshall McLuhan coined the phase The Global Village.This conjures up an image of a cosy friendly community of equals.In real life villages tended to be very unequal places with the squire and other wealthy families owning most of the land and the poorest members of the community agricultural laborers who worked for them for a pittance.The present information global village is pretty much the same and it is only too obvious to name the squires who actually own the land.When it comes to information you actually have to know what information you are looking for.To do this you have to have a  level of education which many people are denied these days.Actually reading a printed book from cover to cover was once part of such an education.There are many snake oil salesmen who will tell you that we now live in a new paradigm and this no longer applies.Such people were only a few years ago telling us that there we now lived in a New Economy which would grow perpetually. Book titles such as The World Is Flat and Living on Thin Air give a flavor of the period of the 1990s and early 2000s. Everything's Coming Up Roses was the general  message. money would make money and trickle down to even the poorest in good time.Such people now seem quite happy and enthusiastic about the demise of the printed book the bringer of literacy and civilisation  for nearly six centuries.