Book? What is that?
The scenario
Entertainment
The year is 2020 and the entertainment industry is rapidly changing. It all started with the invention of the film camera; this device introduced a new era for entertainment. Before, people went to plays and read books in their spare time, but, with the introduction of video, people rather went to the cinema, and, later on, watch entertainment on their televisions. After that, the video games came, at first slowly, and people that played them were actually frowned upon. But, quite quickly, video games become very mainstream, particularly enjoyed by the younger people. This was a new generation of technological savvy people; their entertainment was the internet, games, television and the movies. Books and plays were only reserved for the older, the ones that grew up without computers. Now, this old generation has died and the new generation has grown old. The new generation did not take over the habits of the old generation; they stuck with what they were used to do. While computer- games were, at first, only recognized as "for kids and teenagers" they are now played by the entire population. And what about the old forms of entertainment? Well they have completely disappeared. You'll have to look long and hard if you want to see a play. And a book? Well these are only found in museums today.
Publishers
Throughout the past years publishers have been going to increasingly rough times. First they had to cope with environmental issues; the amount of CO2 they were putting in the air because of printing books became just such a burden. Then, they slowly saw also their revenue on novels going down. As more people that used to read books died the market kept on shrinking. Publishers where still getting a big portion of their revenue from educational books. But after Google has scanned them all and they were freely available on every student's laptop this business disappeared too. Printing books became something of the past and the new medium to distribute knowledge was just the internet. Open-source knowledge sharing proofed to be much more efficient than the traditional books anyway. The point came at which the novel died out and open-source learning became the only way to go. Video-game publishers had never seen bigger streams of revenue, but the literature publisher completely died out.
Society
The impact this had on society wasn't even that big. The environment was definitely better off without all those books being printed. And the "new" generation did not miss books at all. If you wanted to read you'd just browse the internet and for other entertainment there was now a wealth of portable video game devices. The whole society has forgotten about books and they are now only viewed as ancient entertainment or as a severely outdated knowledge transfer method.
Background information
Demography
Old generation
The old generation are basically the people that grew up with the very first generations of television or no television at all. The people had an entirely different kind of entertainment available to them. Primary ways to entertain where in the form of board-games, watching plays and reading books. It seems that this old generation is hanging on to its old entertainment habits. Althought most do watch television or maybe even use the internet, they will also continue to read books, play boardgames and go to plays. However, the newest kinds of entertainment are almost never used by these people; the oldest ones have no idea how to use a computer, and they won't find any joy in playing a video game. When it comes to knowledge, this old generation will also rely heavily on literature, since it was the main way of spreading knowledge in the past, but, if you really think about it and take also the internet into consideration, you'll probably figure out that this is a heavily outdated idea. The inevitable course of action with this old generation is that it will eventually die out. These people are getting older and older and in 30 years or so they will only be a minority of the entire earth's population.
New generation
The new generation involves the people that grew up with television, movies, internet, video games and other electronic entertainment. These people did come in contact with books, plays and board-games, but this does not consist of their main source of entertainment. Sure they all have read a book, but most will watch television or play a video game instead of reading. Since this group of people has not had much contact with the old forms of entertainment, they will most likely not start to use them when they grow older, and thus carry on their interest in electronics. At the time of writing you won't see older people playing video games. But the people that play them now, will play them when they are old too. And their kids or grand-kids will never come into contact with the old forms of entertainment anymore. This new generation is also far more comfortable using the internet to find knowledge, the old way of using books takes far too much time and a lot of the information found in there is outdated anyway. It just makes far more sense to use the internet for knowledge retrieval.
Innovation and society
Innovation is playing a huge part in this development. It is the invention of certain electronics (namely the transistor) that enabled this new entertainment. On top of that comes our fast-paced, information driven society. The combination of the two makes people lean towards forms of entertainment that are quick, actionpacked, interactive and combine both audio as visual stimules. Our past society was much slower and in those times it made sense to invest a lot of time into reading a book. But, in today's society, people want to quickly watch a 30 minute television show, browse the internet for 20 minutes, play one level of a game or see a 90 minutes movie. And all this has to be fast and should not contain a moment of dullness, because time is valuable and should never be wasted. This is also the main reason why education books stopped to work; it's simply too slow and the information is not "fresh" enough. The internet is faster, up-to-date, available at everyones fingertips and much easier to use.
Book industry changes
Of course the book industry will have tried to keep up with all these trends, but there are things you can't fight. Some things are just doomed to die when are not completely in sync with the demands of the society. This is what happened to the book industry regarding novels and educational books. At both fronts of entertainment and information provision they were being attacked by modern alternatives. No innovation could help them here, books are just outdated and are replaced by superior products at every front.
Conclusion
The need for interactivity in entertainment, together with the internet as superior knowledge transfer medium has completely made books obsolete to the generation of tomorrow. Book publishers have gone bankrupt, or had to change their business model to host knowledge sharing website or publish other entertainment like video games or movies. Reading is something you only do on the internet. Soon no one will even know what a book was...