In The Guardian, Rick Gekoski elegantly makes the point that literary culture is disappearing.
“Supposing that we were back in the year 1974, and playing a game of Humiliation (later made popular in David Lodge‘s Changing Places) in which you earn points by naming books that you haven’t read and which you think the other players have. (I used to do well by not having read The Wind in the Willows.) In Lodge’s novel, a competitive young lecturer, playing the game with his English Department colleagues, startles them by announcing that he hasn’t read Hamlet, gleefully gathers a bushel of points, and is fired a few weeks later. How can you employ a lecturer who is this illiterate?
“In 1974, you would have won a lot of points if you hadn’t read these books:
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1953)
JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1953)
William Golding, The Lord of the Flies (1954)
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955)
Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956)
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956)
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
Norman O Brown, Life Against Death (1959)
RD Laing, The Divided Self (1960)
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
Pauline Reage, The Story of O (1965)
Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (1967)
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1967)
Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)
Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (1968)
Arthur Janov, The Primal Scream (1970)
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1971)
Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycling Maintenance (1974)
“Mind you, I was lucky: I lived through a time when it was great to read. There were so many books that you just had to read, which would have been read by everyone you knew. Not merely read, though, but digested and discussed. We formed not merely our opinions but ourselves on them. There was a common culture – or, more accurately, a common counter-culture – which included music, art and film. If there was some faddishness in this, and a concomitant homogenisation of taste, there was the palpable upside of having plenty of people with whom to share one’s enthusiasms.
“This is common enough with music: as our parents had Gershwin and Cole Porter, we had the Stones and the Beatles, and our children have garage, or hip-hop, or whatever it’s called. Yes, all of us could sing “When I’m Sixty-Four”, or “Honky Tonk Women”. But what was really 
uncommon, much more than we would have realised, was that we could all sing from the same books as well. And I don’t mean merely the hottest novels and books of poetry, but philosophy, psychology, feminism, politics, and what is now, alas, called media studies. And there was nothing provincial about the list: the writers come from the US, England, Australia, France, Germany, Canada.
“Of course I realise that what we read in Ivy League colleges and at Oxford was not representative of the general population. But the point still stands: within our middle-class, educated world there was a canon, which wasn’t limited to Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Scott Fitzgerald. You could assume people had read the hot contemporary books; when they hadn’t, it occasioned not merely puzzlement, but disapproval.
“So: let me ask – you’ll have seen this one coming – if we asked a bunch of literate university students today what they had read, what they had all read – what would be the answer? I suspect the answer would be: Nothing. Not that young people don’t read, but they don’t read together. They haven’t got, as we had, a common culture: books to devour and discuss and be formed by.
“Perhaps things happen earlier these days? In my adolescence we had few common reading experiences, just the usual shared TV shows and sports teams to support. Whereas today, while two 20-year-olds might search in vain for a list of books they were both excited by, two 13-year-olds would be babbling away within seconds. Harry Potter? Cool! Stephanie Meyer? Awesome! I don’t wish to sound scornful about this, nor reflexively to regard such reading as 
dumbing down. Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials trilogy, which is very widely read within this age group, is one of the classics of our time, for both children and adults.
“I have read, and quite enjoyed in my superannuated fashion, both Rowling and Meyer. But there is a long way to go from sharing these escapist enthusiams, and entering a complex and demanding literary culture. Indeed, and ironically, such reading might just retard the entry into such a culture, though it certainly doesn’t need to. You don’t have to read fancily, or be unrelentingly highbrow, to love literature and to take it seriously. I wish that the pleasure of reading, across the whole spectrum of literature, in all its variety, were part of a shared culture amongst young people today. But it isn’t.”
Philip Roth spoke to a similar point in an interview with Tina Brown in The Daily Beast a year ago:
Tina Brown: You said in an interview that you don’t think novels are going to be read 25 years from now. Were you being provocative or do you believe that to be true?
Philip Roth: I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it’ll be a small group of people—maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range.
Tina Brown: Is there anything you think that novelists can do about that or do you think that it’s just that the narrative form is going to die out? It’s just the length of them or what? Is that what’s dictating you writing shorter books now?
Philip Roth: It’s the print. That’s the problem. It’s the book. It’s the object itself. To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really. So I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities.
Tina Brown: Do you feel that the Kindle is not going to be that? I mean, when I’m on airplanes now, I now see people with Kindles all the time. And a lot of people I speak have Kindles—you know, I have one, but I don’t read it as often because I still like books—tell me they read more on Kindle than they did on hard copy.
Philip Roth: Maybe. I’m not familiar with the Kindle. I mean, I’ve seen one but I haven’t used it. I read the piece in The New Yorker, by Nicholson Baker, which was very good. He had his skepticism. I don’t think the Kindle will make any difference to what I’m talking about, which is that the book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen and it can’t compete with the computer screen I don’t think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the book can’t measure up. I may be wrong.”