Russell Smith of the Globe on why we should lament the decline of the book:  "[W]e lose forever the pleasure known to humanity for 500 years of taking a stroll up and down the aisles of someone else’s brain by perusing their bookshelves."

Also: some recommendations for books to read: De Niro's Game, by Rawi Hage;  Evelyn Waugh's satire of Fleet Street journalism, Scoop (featuring the nature columnist William Boot's immortal line, "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole"); and, in the non-fiction aisle, The Lost City of Z, the journalist David Grann's story of following in the footsteps of the British explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon rainforest in 1925 while searching for a mysterious lost civilization.