For some time now, Virginia Quarterly Review’s Jane Friedman has been trying to wean readers away from the standard idea of “The Book” as the inevitable goal. Here she is, in a piece from October, asking “What is your killer medium?”:
The book is often assumed to be the most authoritative and important medium, but that’s only because we’ve all been led to believe that (through a culture that has created The Myth about the author as authority). It’s a Myth, neither good nor bad. Just a belief system that, increasingly, we’re all moving away from.