> Curiosities aside, what makes the Fair so special is that it is about books. Books with covers and pages have, in a society dominated by social media and other sorts of online detritus, become functionally obsolete.
This is followed by several paragraphs about expensive, cultured books, and then about her own experience with a Kindle.
Most books are not the unique artifacts she talks about, or the works of Geoffrey Hartman. They're usually paperback, usually won't get a second edition, and really are about as disposable as e-books. You can see this in a microcosm with the books that this site is interested in: go to a library's programming section and the timeless books are dwarfed by a depressingly large section of reference manuals on old versions of Java and Visual Basic.
I'm not sure this is a bad thing! The heartless, disposable nature of the industry keeps the books I do want to read affordable. The author with her large collection of e-books actually is an outlier, with e-books only making up 20-30% of book publishing in the US. This share has been static over the past few years. Books only are a relic of a past age in her own mind.