It's a very startling article about the rise in readership, especially the point "And it’s not just crap books."

I have a friend who's writing a PhD on the evolution of screenwriting manuals from the silent era onwards, and part of his theory (I think) is that there's a cycle - we establish and define rules, we put them into practice (good scripts), we learn how to stretch and break them (even better scripts) and then the rules become cliches, outdated, and we have to establish new rules and the cycle begins again. Looks to me like we might be in the rule-breaking phase...?