A commencement address

Once in a while you come across commencement addresses that are truly inspiring. Here are excerpts from one by Fareed Zakaria.

"The best commencement speech I ever read was by the humorist Art Buchwald. He was brief, saying simply, “Remember, we are leaving you a perfect world. Don’t screw it up.”

You are not going to hear that message much these days. Instead, you’re likely to hear that we are living through grim economic times, that the graduates are entering the slowest recovery since the Great Depression. The worries are not just economic. Ever since 9/11, we have lived in an age of terror, and our lives remain altered by the fears of future attacks and a future of new threats and dangers. Then there are larger concerns that you hear about: The Earth is warming; we’re running out of water and other vital resources; we have a billion people on the globe trapped in terrible poverty.

So, I want to sketch out for you, perhaps with a little bit of historical context, the world as I see it.

The world we live in is, first of all, at peace — profoundly at peace. The richest countries of the world are not in geopolitical competition with one another, fighting wars, proxy wars, or even engaging in arms races or “cold wars.” This is a historical rarity. You would have to go back hundreds of years to find a similar period of great power peace. I know that you watch a bomb going off in Afghanistan or hear of a terror plot in this country and think we live in dangerous times. But here is the data. The number of people who have died as a result of war, civil war, and, yes, terrorism, is down 50 percent this decade from the 1990s. It is down 75 percent from the preceding five decades, the decades of the Cold War, and it is, of course, down 99 percent from the decade before that, which is World War II. Steven Pinker says that we are living in the most peaceful times in human history, and he must be right because he is a Harvard professor.

The political stability we have experienced has allowed the creation of a single global economic system, in which countries around the world are participating and flourishing. In 1980, the number of countries that were growing at 4 percent a year — robust growth — was around 60. By 2007, it had doubled. Even now, after the financial crisis, that number is more than 80. Even in the current period of slow growth, keep in mind that the global economy as a whole will grow 10 to 20 percent faster this decade than it did a decade ago, 60 percent faster than it did two decades ago, and five times as fast as it did three decades ago.

The result: The United Nations estimates that poverty has been reduced more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500 years. And much of that reduction has taken place in the last 20 years. The average Chinese person is 10 times richer than he or she was 50 years ago — and lives for 25 years longer. Life expectancy across the world has risen dramatically. We gain five hours of life expectancy every day — without even exercising! A third of all the babies born in the developed world this year will live to be 100.

All this is because of rising standards of living, hygiene, and, of course, medicine. Atul Gawande, a Harvard professor who is also a practicing surgeon, and who also writes about medicine for The New Yorker, writes about a 19th century operation in which the surgeon was trying to amputate his patient’s leg. He succeeded — at that — but accidentally amputated his assistant’s finger as well. Both died of sepsis, and an onlooker died of shock. It is the only known medical procedure to have a 300 percent fatality rate. We’ve come a long way.

To understand the astonishing age of progress we are living in, you just look at the cellphones in your pockets. (Many of you have them out and were already looking at them. Don’t think I can’t see you.) Your cellphones have more computing power than the Apollo space capsule. That capsule couldn’t even Tweet! So just imagine the opportunities that lie ahead. Moore’s Law — that computing power doubles every 18 months while costs halve — may be slowing down in the world of computers, but it is accelerating in other fields. The human genome is being sequenced at a pace faster than Moore’s Law. A “Third Industrial Revolution,” involving material science and the customization of manufacturing, is yet in its infancy. And all these fields are beginning to intersect and produce new opportunities that we cannot really foresee.

The good news goes on. Look at the number of college graduates globally. It has risen fourfold in the last four decades for men, but it has risen sevenfold for women. I believe that the empowerment of women, whether in a village in Africa or a boardroom in America, is good for the world. If you are wondering whether women are in fact smarter than men, the evidence now is overwhelming: yes. My favorite example of this is a study done over the last 25 years in which it found that female representatives in the House of Congress were able to bring back $49 million more in federal grants than their male counterparts. So it turns out women are better than men even at pork-barrel spending. We can look forward to a world enriched and ennobled by women’s voices.

..

When I tell you that we live in an age of progress, I am not urging complacency — far from it. We have had daunting challenges over the last 100 years: a depression, two world wars, a Cold War, 9/11, and global economic crisis. But we have overcome them by our response. Human action and human achievement have managed to tackle terrible problems.

We forget our successes. In 2009, the H1N1 virus broke out in Mexico. Now, if you looked back at the trajectory of these kinds of viruses, it is quite conceivable this one would have spread like the Asian flu in 1957 or 1968, in which 4,000,000 people died. But this time, the Mexican health authorities identified the problem early, shared the information with the WHO, learned best practices fast, tracked down where the outbreak began, quarantined people, and vaccinated others. The country went on a full-scale alert, banning any large gatherings. In a Catholic country, you couldn’t go to church for three Sundays. Perhaps more importantly, you couldn’t go to soccer matches either. The result was that the virus was contained, to the point where, three months later, people wondered what the big fuss was and asked if we had all overreacted. We didn’t overreact; we reacted, we responded, and we solved the problem.

There are other examples. In the 12 months following the economic peak in 2008, industrial production fell by as much as it did in the first year of the depression. Equity prices and global trade fell more. Yet this time, no Great Depression followed. Why? Because of the coordinated actions of governments around the world. 9/11 did not usher in an age of terrorism, with al-Qaida going from strength to strength. Why? Because countries cooperated in fighting them and other terror groups, with considerable success. When we can come together, when we cooperate, when we put aside petty differences, the results are astounding.

So, when we look at the problems we face — economic crises, terrorism, climate change, resource scarcity — keep in mind that these problems are real, but also that the human reaction and response to them will also be real. We can more easily map out the big problem than the thousands of individual actions governments, firms, organizations, and people will take that will constitute the solution.

…

What are the industries of the future? Honestly, I have no idea. But one thing I do know is that human beings will reward and honor those talents of heart and mind they have always honored for thousands of years: intelligence, hard work, discipline, courage, loyalty and, perhaps above all, love and a generosity of spirit. Those are the qualities that, at the end of the day, make you live a great life, one that is rewarded by the outside world, and a good life, one that is rewarded only by those who know you best. These are the virtues that people honor, that they built statues for 5,000 years ago. …

 I will give you one last piece of wisdom that comes with age. For all of you who are graduating students or, really, anyone who is still young, trust me. You cannot possibly understand the love that your parents have for you until you have children of your own. Once you have your own kids, their strange behavior will suddenly make sense. But don’t wait that long. On this day of all days, give them a hug, and tell them that you love them."

In the world of tweets

Let me begin with a confession- I have never tweeted. I have always considered the 140 character email, which is what a tweet is, an abomination and a curse upon good writing and communication and something which should be confined to juvenile teenagers. So with that said, it is still possible to have a clear attitude towards the new emerging phenomenon of Twitter where even presidents, sadly, have fallen a prey to this fad.

“Few things could appear much worse, to the lurker, glimpser, or guesser, than this scrolling suicide note of Western civilization.” Say the editors of N+1 magazine, “ Never more than 140 characters at a time? Looks like the human attention span crumbling like a Roman aqueduct. The endless favoriting and retweeting of other people’s tweets? Sounds like a digital circle jerk. Birds were born to make the repetitive, pleasant, meaningless sounds called twittering." But people?

Of course, there are some compensations if you sign up for a Twitter account with someone intelligent. At its best, Twitter can delight and instruct. Somebody, often somebody you wouldn’t expect, condenses the World-Spirit into a great joke or epigram. "What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed," you think.  A tweet is so short that you can get right to the point . Thus Twitter has brought about the very last thing to have been expected from the internet: a renovation of the epigram or aphorism, a revaluation of the literary virtues of terseness and impersonality. Aphorisms are ideally consumed like nuts or candies, a handful at a time. So Twitter doesn’t only have the widely recognized usefulness of providing updates on news and revolution, and illuminating links, and many laughs and smirks. It has also brought about a surprising revival of the epigrammatic impulse. “Write as short as you can/ In order/ Of what matters,” John Berryman counseled in a pre-tweet of 44 characters.

Also, argue the proponents of Tweets, through friends may let you know what they think you should read, hear, watch. But are you friends with the famous environmentalist who, live-tweeting the apocalypse, tells you each time a new locality sets an April heat record in March? Or with Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose ghost had a feed?  The San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM (CST) and separated them into six categories:

• Pointless babble
 – 40%

• Conversational – 38%

• Pass-along value – 9%

• Self-promotion – 6%

• Spam
 – 4%

• News – 4%

The fact is that most tweets say nothing worthwhile. It is like “I have nothing to say but I want to say something anyway.”

The rise of the Tweet, there are over 140 million active users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day, takes place amid an internet-induced cheapening of language, in both good and bad senses. The economic cheapness of digital publication democratizes expression and gives a necessary public to writers, and types of writing, that otherwise would be confined to the hard drive or the desk drawer. And yet the supreme ease of putting words online has opened up vast new space for carelessness, confusion, whateverism.

Closely related to but in a different category altogether is the world of blogging. The accidental progenitor of the bloggers style is David Foster Wallace. What distinguishes Wallace’s writing from the prose it begot is a fusion of the scrupulous and the garrulous; all of our colloquialisms, typically diffusing a mist of vagueness over the world, are pressed into the service of exactness. To a generation of writers, the DFW style was the sound of telling the truth, as — in an opposite way — the flat declaratives and simplified vocabulary of Hemingway were for a different generation. But an individual style, terse or wordy, can breed a generalized mannerism, and the path once cleared to saying things truly and well is now an obstacle course. In the case of the blogging, institutional and technological pressures coincided with Wallace’s example. Bloggers have little or no editing to deal with, and if they blogged for money they needed to produce, produce. The combination has discouraged the stylistic virtues of concision, selectivity, and impersonality.

So we must wait till this fad too runs its course or a new fad requiring only 44 characters emerges!

The Wisdom of Bill Gates

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about
eleven (11) things they did not and will not learn in school.
He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings
created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and
how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.  

Rule 1 : Life is not fair - get used to it! 

Rule 2 : The world doesn't care about your self-esteem.
The world will expect you to accomplish something
BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school.
You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss 

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity.
Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping:
They called it opportunity.

Rule 6 : If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault,
so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring
as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills,
cleaning your clothes and listening to you
talk about how cool you thought you were:
So before you save the rain forest
from the parasites of your parent's generation,
try delousing the closet in your own room..

Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers,
but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades
and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. *This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters.
You don't get summers off and very few employers
are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. *Do that on your own time.

Rule 10 : Television is NOT real life.
In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11 : Be nice to nerds.
Chances are you'll end up working for one.. 

Meddling with success

The Indian Minister of Human Resource development, Kabil Sibal had, on May 28, announced that from 2013, aspiring candidates for IITs and other central institutes like NITs and IIITs will have to sit under a new format of common entrance test, which will also take the plus-two board results into consideration. The minister had claimed that it was approved without dissent at a council consisting of the IITs, the IIITs and the NITs. 

His announcement led to a firestrom of criticism from the entire IIT group of directors and alumni for trying to change a system, which had made IIT a global brand.The fact is that for the past five decades, the entrance examination for IITs, called IIT-JEE, has been the gold standard in the country for its fairness, effectiveness and lack of corruption. To get through the IIT-JEE meant that you had become a part of an elite through your own merits wherever you came from.

Christopher Hayes, an American author in his book “Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy,” describes a similar system “It was at Hunter” he says, “that I absorbed the open-minded, self-assured cosmopolitanism that is the guiding ethos of the current American ruling class. What animates the school is a collective delight in the talent and energy of its students and a general feeling of earned superiority. In 1982 a Hunter alumnus profiled the school in a New York magazine article called “The Joyful Elite” and identified its “most singular trait” as the “exuberantly smug loyalty of its students.”That loyalty emanates from the deeply held conviction that Hunter embodies the meritocratic ideal as much as any institution in the country. Unlike elite colleges, which use all kinds of subjective measures—recommendations, résumés, writing samples, parental legacies and interviews—in deciding who gains admittance, entrance to Hunter rests on a single “objective” measure: one three-hour test. If you clear the bar, you’re in; if not, you’re out. There are no legacy admissions, and there are no strings to pull for the well connected. If Michael Bloomberg’s daughter took the test and didn’t pass, she wouldn’t get in. There are only a handful of institutions left in the country about which this can be said.”

IIT’s in India are one of those rare institutions in the world where it can still be said that entrance is based purely on merit. It is a shining example in the world where no amount of lobbying or political power can gain entrance and where true merit is the only criterion that prevails. Hence the graduates of these schools have what Chris calls the "open-minded, self-assured cosmopolitanism" and the deeply held conviction  of their own singular merits and abilities. And it is this and the training they received while at IIT, that has led them to pinnacles of achievement.

In these discussions there is another element that most people overlook – the democratizing nature of this approach. Any body can apply for admission- there are no requirements of status in society, no filters of whether you can write or speak English with an Oxford accent or know how to eat with a fork and knife or have a father that went to the same school. The only thing you need is your ability to meet the tough standards set up for the admission.

As Chris points out that “because it is public and free, the school pulls kids from all over the city, many of whom are first-generation Americans, the children of immigrant strivers from Korea, Russia and Pakistan. Half the students have at least one parent born outside the United States. For all these reasons Hunter is, in its own imagination, a place where anyone with drive and brains can be catapulted from the anonymity of working-class outer-borough neighborhoods to the inner sanctum of the American elite. “

It is true that in recent years, a number of test preparation schools have mushroomed that offer to train aspiring students for the IIT-JEE and some of them are quite pricy thus theoretically still providing an edge to the richer elements of the Indian society. But fortunately a number of NGO’s have grown which take students from the slums and train them as well. I wrote of one of these efforts, "The will to succeed" in my blog some time ago.


IIT students have demonstrated the same career graph-they have led the digital revolution and a large number of Silicon valley startups have IIT degrees in their back pack. They have contributed to their alma maters setting up various schools of development in their IIT. Today there is no IIT which does not have an alumni sponsored program or school.


Resistance to this ministerial meddling will grow and this has already started. The Senates of the IIT-Kanpur and Delhi have rejected the Centre's 'one-nation one-test' proposal and decided to conduct its own entrance exam from next year. Other IIT’s have similar reactions as well and will soon have Senate resolutions mirroring the IIT-Kanpur resolution.

The fact is that IIT system needs to be replicated in other reaches of our education system. The proposal of Kabil Sibal only manages to destroy a perfectly working system for IIT but does little to address the rest of the educational system. He needs to retreat and listen to the IIT directors, students and alumni.

Looking to the past for today’s solutions

Whenever we face insurmountable problems, there is a yearning for a leader who will lead us out of the mess or a reference to an olden era where the solutions to present-day problems lie. In India we often revert to Geeta or the Mahabharata to see how they solved the big issues of the day and derive some comfort from the fact that there is nothing new under the sun and that perhaps a more devoted perusal of old classics will provide guidance for us for the future.

Here is an effort by a Armand D'Angour , a Greek scholar to search for answers from the old Greek sages to some of the problems of the day. For example what advice would the ancient Greeks provide to help modern Greeks with their current financial worries?

1. Debt, division and revolt.  In the early 6th Century BC, the people of Athens were burdened with debt, social division and inequality, with poor farmers prepared to sell themselves into slavery just to feed their families. Revolution was imminent, but the aristocrat Solon emerged as a just mediator between the interests of rich and poor. He abolished debt bondage, limited land ownership, and divided the citizen body into classes with different levels of wealth and corresponding financial obligations. His measures, although attacked on all sides, were adopted and paved the way for the eventual creation of democracy.

Solon's success demonstrates that great statesmen must have the courage to implement unpopular compromises for the sake of justice and stability. But is there one living today?

2. How would the gods on Mount Olympus tackle the IMF and the bond markets?  Faced with the financial armageddon in their time, the ancient Greeks would have gone to the Delphi for the oracle’s words. Ancient Delphi was the site of Apollo's oracle, believed to be inspired by the god to utter truths. Her utterances, however, were unintelligible and needed to be interpreted by priests, who generally turned them into ambiguous prophecies. In response to, say, "Should Greece leave the euro?" the oracle might have responded: "Greece should abandon the euro if the euro has abandoned Greece," leaving proponents and opponents of "Grexit" to squabble over what exactly that meant. 


It is, of course, something like listening to modern day economists. At least the oracle had the excuse of inhaling the smoke of laurel leaves. Wiser advice may be found in the mottos inscribed on the face of Apollo's temple at Delphi, advocating moderation and self-knowledge: "Know yourself. Nothing in excess."

3. Will this ever end?

If modern Greeks feel overwhelmed by today's financial problems, they might take some comfort from remembering the world-weary advice from their ancestor Pythagoras that "everything comes round again, so nothing is completely new". Pythagoras of Samos was a 6th Century BC mystic sage who believed that numbers are behind everything in the universe - and that cosmic events recur identically over a cycle of 10,800 years. 


In short, this means that  "There is nothing new under the sun".

4. How do we face this challenge?

"Hold fast, my heart, you have endured worse suffering," Odysseus exhorts himself in Homer's Odyssey, from the 8th Century BC.Having battled hostile elements and frightful monsters on his return home across the sea from Troy to his beloved Ithaka and wife Penelope, Odysseus here prevents himself from jeopardising a successful finale as a result of impatience.

The stirring message is that whatever the circumstances, one should recognise that things could be, and have been, even worse. Harder challenges have been faced and - with due intelligence and fortitude - overcome.

5. Are you sure that we are following the right path?

By cross-examining ordinary people, the philosophers aimed to get to the heart of complex questions such as "What is justice?" and "How should we live?" Often no clear answer emerged, but Socrates insisted that we keep on asking the questions. "The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being," he said.

Socrates bequeathed to humanity a duty to keep on thinking with tireless integrity, even when - or particularly when - definite answers are unlikely to be found.

6. Do we have the right leaders?

The most brilliantly inventive of comic playwrights, Aristophanes was happy to mock contemporary Athenian politicians of every stripe. He was also the first to coin a word for "innovation".His comedy Frogs of 405 BC, which featured the first representation of aerial warfare, contained heartfelt and unambiguous advice for his politically fickle fellow citizens. 


"Choose good leaders, or you will be stuck with bad ones."

7. Should we do the same as last time?

"You can't step into the same river twice" is one of the statements of Heraclitus, in the early 5th Century BC - his point being that the ceaseless flow of the water makes for a different river each time you step into it.!




While change is constant, different things change at different rates. In an environment of ceaeless flux, it is important to identify stable markers and to hold fast to them. Magical or wishful thinking cannot bring a cure. Only honest, exhaustive, empirical observation can hope to reveal what works and what does not.

8. Finding solutions?

Asked to measure whether a crown was made of pure gold, the Sicilian Greek Archimedes (3rd Century BC) puzzled over a solution.The story goes that when he eventually took a bath and saw the water rising as he stepped in, it struck him that an object's volume could be measured by the water it displaced - and when weighed, their relative density could be calculated. He was so excited by his discovery that he jumped out of the bath and ran naked through Syracuse shouting "Eureka!" - Greek for "I've got it!"

Finding the solution to a knotty problem requires hard thinking, but the answer often comes only when you switch off - and take a bath!!


I wonder if any Indian writer has delved as deeply into the sages of the past for answers to our present day problems. What advice could Valmiki give to Manmohan Singh? Has not the BJP followed the prescriptions of Chankaya in its strategies ? The American scene today also seems to yearn for the past in its prescriptions for the future- and not always successfully. 


The real lesson is be "learn from the past but be careful in looking for all answers in the past to today's problems."

A virus from hell

It begins in such a benign manner - a rash, headache, fever, some blisters, a little pain- but then it becomes really really painful as if you are on fire or a constant receipient of electric shocks. The pain may begin as if you are on "pins and needles" with tingling, pricking, or numbness or even sensations of burning but all these soon become agonising "pain that make even grown men cry". Welcome to the world of shingles.

I am only now emerging from its embrace and the memory still chills me. In the intensity of the pain, the constancy of the stress and the inability to think about anything but the next spasm of pain that this virus often brings, it is truly a virus from hell.

To add insult to injury, it typically attacks people over 60! Just when you thought these diseases were in the past, out comes a hammer which flattens you. It seems over 1 million people a year in the US get shingles and over 1 in 3 will be attacked by this virus in their lifetime.

Shingles, or its medical name, Herpes zoster, is a viral disease characterized by a painful skin rash with blisters in a limited area on one side of the body, often in a stripe. The initial infection with varicella zoster virus (VZV) causes the acute but short-lived illness chickenpox, which generally occurs in children and young people. But once an episode of chickenpox has resolved, the virus is not eliminated from the body but can go on to cause shingles—an illness with very different symptoms—often many years after the initial infection. 

This sneaky little zoster virus remains dormant in the nerve of a person who has had chickenpox only to re-emerge years later. Occasionally it will probe your body's defenses, and if your resistance happens to be lower -- more likely as you get older, for example, or if you've recently had an illness that's played havoc with your immune system -- the virus shoots down a nerve, causing the numbness, itching, severe pain, and later the blistering rash associated with shingles.The virus is usually contained to an area of skin called a dermatome. This is the descriptive name for an area of skin supplied by a particular group of nerves. While the rash you have might spread along this dermatome, it almost never crosses into another one. This means that if it isn't already on your face, it won't go there. Stress won't spread the virus, but being stressed will affect your immune system. 

While shingles is not life-threatening per se, but it can be pretty debilitating. If it involves your face or eyes, it can threaten your eyesight. Even after the rash abates, you can be left with pain in that section of the body that can be set off by even trivial stimuli, such as the touch of a shirt against the skin. Sometimes it can prevent people from leaving their house. The older we get, the greater the risk. If you survive to age 80, you have a 25% to 50% chance of having had shingles.

But the rash isn't the worst part, says Karl R. Beutner, MD, PhD, associate clinical professor of dermatology at the University of California, San Francisco, who calls the disease "highly underrated." Before the rash appears on your body, the inflammation in the affected nerve causes a tingling, "creepy-crawly" pain called postherpetic neuralgia that can linger for months and even years. "There have been quality-of-life studies showing that a bad case of shingles is worse than a heart attack in terms of how long the pain lasts," Beutner says. Postherpetic neuralgia is a persistent nerve pain that lasts long after the skin lesions heal. "The incidence of postherpetic neuralgia rises dramatically in people over 50," says Jorizzo. "It's probably due to some sort of scar produced by the inflammation caused by all the viral particles coming down the sensory nerve."


Yet not all hope is lost. There is now a vaccine that can be taken.  The shingles vaccine, Zostavax, contains a weakened chickenpox virus (varicella-zoster virus) which helps stimulate your immune system to battle the disease, reducing the risk of getting shingles in people aged 50 and older. In scientific studies, the shingles vaccine reduces the risk of developing shingles by about 50%.  

If you get shingles, the only other option is to resort to painkillers till the rash dissappears. There again new medicines are now available that tackle the inflamed or damaged nerves that are the cause of the chronic pain.

The bottom line is : it's important to get shingles treated early and aggressively, both to minimize pain in the acute phase and prevent chronic pain after the rash has gone. 

The death of the old publishing and bookselling industry

I have been writing for the past year on the revolution underway in the book publishing and book selling industry. Here is an article which traces the history of one of the major forces behind this revolution- Amazon.

Bookselling in the United States had always been less of a business than a calling. Profit margins were notoriously thin, and most independent stores depended on low rents. Walk-in traffic was often sporadic, the public’s taste fickle; reliance on a steady stream of bestsellers to keep the landlord at bay was not exactly a sure-fire strategy for remaining solvent.

Still, overall, selling books was a big business. In 1994 Americans bought $19 billion worth of books. Barnes & Noble and the Borders Group had by then captured a quarter of the market, with independent stores struggling to make up just over another fifth and a skein of book clubs, supermarkets and other outlets accounting for the rest. That same year, 513 million individual books were sold, and seventeen bestsellers each sold more than 1 million copies.

In the mid- to late 1990s, when online bookselling was in its infancy, Barnes & Noble and Borders were busy expanding their empires, often opening stores adjacent to long-established community bookstores. The independents were alarmed by these and other aggressive strategies. The chain stores could give customers deeply discounted offerings on a depth of stock made possible by favorable publishers’ terms not extended to independents. Clerks at the chains might not intimately know the tastes and predilections of the surrounding neighborhood, but the price was right: lower was better, lowest was best.

For many the notion that bricks-and-mortar bookstores might one day disappear was unthinkable. As Jason Epstein put it : “A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.”

Enter Steve Bezos of Amazon who set out to construct a twenty-first-century ordering mechanism that, at least for the short term, would deliver goods the old-fashioned way: by hand, from warehouses via the Postal Service and commercial shippers. But he was extending reader access to a greater diversity of books. After all, even the largest 60,000-square-foot emporiums of Barnes & Noble and Borders could carry no more than 175,000 titles. Amazon, by contrast, was virtually limitless in its offerings. And its growth over the last decade has been phenomenal ousting the old fashioned bookstores from their heady perches.

The death toll tells the tale. Two decades ago, there were about 4,000 independent bookstores in the United States; only about 1,900 remain. And now, even the victors are imperiled. The fate of the two largest US chain bookstores—themselves partly responsible for putting smaller stores to the sword—is instructive: Borders declared bankruptcy in 2011 and closed its several hundred stores across the country, its demise benefiting over the short term its rival Barnes & Noble, which is nonetheless desperately trying to figure out ways to pay the mortgage on the considerable real estate occupied by its 1,332 stores across the nation. It is removing thousands of physical books from stores in order to create nifty digital zones to persuade customers to embrace the Nook e-book readers, the company’s alternative to Amazon’s Kindle

The sad fact is that today bookstore wars are over. Independents are battered, Borders is dead, Barnes & Noble weakened but still standing and Amazon triumphant.

Yet still there is no peace; a new war rages for the future of publishing. What is clear is that “legacy publishing,” like old-fashioned bookselling, is gone. Just as bookselling is increasingly virtual, so is publishing. Technology has democratized both the means of production and distribution. The implications for traditional publishers are acute. One thing, however, is certain, and about it publishers agree: e-book sales as a percentage of overall revenue are skyrocketing. Soon one out of every three sales of adult trade titles will be in the form of an e-book. The inexorable shift in the United States from physical to digital books poses a palpable threat to the ways publishers have gone about their business.

The inability of most traditional publishers to successfully adapt to technological change may be rooted in the retrograde editorial and marketing culture that has long characterized the publishing industry. As one prominent literary agent told me, “This is a business run by English majors, not business majors.” Not very long ago it was thought no one would read a book on a computer screen. That assumption is now demonstrably wrong. Today, whether writers will continue to publish the old-fashioned way or go over to direct online publishing is an open question. How it will be answered is at the heart of the struggle taking place between Amazon and traditional publishers.

How the Digital Age might alter attention spans and perhaps even how we tell one another stories is a subject of considerable angst. The success of Amazon’s Kindle Single program, an effort to encourage writers to make an end run around publishers, not only of books but of magazines as well. That program offers writers a chance to publish original e-book essays of no more than 30,000 words (authors agree to a bargain-basement price of no more than $2.99 in exchange for a 70 percent royalty and no advance). It has attracted Nelson DeMille, Jon Krakauer, William Vollmann, Walter Mosley, Ann Patchett, Amy Tan and the late Christopher Hitchens as well as a slew of lesser-known scribblers, some of whom have enjoyed paydays rivaling or exceeding what they might have gotten were magazines like Vanity Fair or The New Yorker to have commissioned their work. Royalties are direct-deposited monthly, and authors can check their sales anytime—a level of efficiency and transparency almost unknown at traditional publishers and magazines.

E-book sales have been a highly addictive drug to many smaller publishers. For one thing, there are no ‘returns.’ E-book sales allowed smaller presses to get a taste of the kind of money that online impulse buying can produce. Already e-book sales were underwriting the publication of paper books-and-ink at Wings Press.

Even as Amazon moves towards integrating publishing and selling books, concerns are being raised about its monopoly of the sector. In the realm of electronic publishing, Amazon until recently controlled about 90 percent of the market, a monopoly by almost anyone’s definition. Most people bought their e-books in the proprietary Kindle file format that could only be purchased from Amazon and only read on the Kindle reader that was manufactured by Amazon. Other makers of e-book readers designed them to accept the open-source e-pub format that allowed customers to have a wider choice of retailers to supply them with e-books. Since then, Amazon’s market share has been declining, but 60 percent of all e-books in America continue to be sold by Amazon in the Kindle file format.“Monopolies are always problematic in a free society, and they are more so when we are dealing with the dissemination of ideas, which is what book publishing is about. “ says one critic. “ And when their business interest conflicts with the public interest, the public interest suffers.”

The history of writing, however, gives us every reason to be confident that new forms of literary excellence will emerge, every bit as rigorous, pleasurable and enduring as the vaunted forms of yesteryear. Perhaps the discipline of tapping 140 characters on Twitter will one day give rise to a form as admirable and elegant as haiku was in its day. Perhaps the interactive features of graphic display and video interpolation, hyperlinks and the simultaneous display of multiple panels made possible by the World Wide Web will prompt new and compelling ways of telling one another the stories our species seems biologically programmed to tell. Perhaps all this will add to the rich storehouse of an evolving literature whose contours we have only begun to glimpse, much less to imagine.