The future of books

A while ago, I posted a picture of the garage where we lived. After my father finished building the house, the garage became, first, a garage. Then, my mother opened a book store. If I recall correctly, my father was away a lot of the time, working construction jobs that would take him away from early Monday morning to late Friday evening. The Westminster Book Shop gave my mother an interesting project and a chance at a dream.
You'd never have a more passionate bookshop owner than my mother. You'd also not likely have a more unlikely owner. She'd rather give books away than sell them, read than market, talk than run a business. We lived nearly three miles from town, so there wasn't a lot of walk-in traffic. She didn't drive at the time, so, well, you get the idea. As difficult as it was for her to accept at the time, it probably wasn't a bad idea that my father decided to reclaim the garage for a welding business. (Interestingly, he wasn't great at running a business, either, and had more freedom working for other people than working for himself. Another story for another day.)
Out of that time, of the book shop, came the Hakkarainen Clipping Service ("No obligation to read, acknowledge, or return."), a practice that was, for my mother, as natural as breathing, to send newspaper clippings, magazines, books, and anything else written to someone for whom this might be interesting. It's what blogging looked like in the Eisenhower era, except that the messages were delivered to one person at a time and the communications medium was the mailman.
Spin forward a half century and we have plenty of new things to consider. One intriguing site came across the wire this morning by way of this post, Building communities: Introducing Bookfuturism.com « Snarkmarket. The site is Bookfuturism | mapping the future of reading: "Bookfuturism.com is a digital commons and multi-user blog open to anyone interested in the future of reading."
It's a new site with just a few contributors so far. The threads around newspapers and books and such are things that we've discussed here and elsewhere around town. So, let's see where it goes.