Leaders: Curl up with a good screen | The Economist

Excerpt from The Economist’s The World in 2011 edition

They should call it McLuhan’s law (after Marshall McLuhan), as inexorable as gravity or the doubling of processing power. New media technologies inevitably change the works they transmit—the medium becoming the message, as the Canadian scholar first observed. This fate has finally caught up with the book. If 2010 was the year e-readers and tablet computers entered the mainstream, 2011 will be when the electronic reading vessel truly disrupts its content. On multipurpose mobile devices, from smart-phones to the iPad and its emerging competitors, the book will cease to be a book. It will be an “app”.

Leaders: Curl up with a good screen | The Economist