Books will never go out of style, even if print media does. As much as people like to hear themselves speak, they also like to see themselves in print. The thoughts you form in your head sound somehow more intelligent when you write them out than we you say them. Somehow you become a more substantial person as a writer of thoughts than a thinker of the same. Somehow there is accomplishment in writing, even if no one but you reads it. Plus, there can be ownership of the written word in a way not afforded by its spoken brother; attributed to can now be definitively authored by, or just, sweetly, by. And people are vain, they like to leave legacies. In an internet age where memory fades fast due to constant replacement of preoccupations, we crave all the more desperately for something lasting. Ironic, then, how easily the lasting can be destroyed, or--worse--stolen. No matter how much you pour into your writing, no matter how long you spend deliberating over the right words to put forth, there remains the anonymity that invariably comes with separation of the writer from his physical voice.
But maybe that's not the point of the written word at all, the authorship. Maybe the point is the argument, no matter what it derives from, or where. Moreover, the miracle of writing is that stories don't have to be autobiographical; they aren't limited to the scope of the author's experience. You can be anything, when you write about anything.
