Two main points: 1) Exclusive genre is artificial and arbitrary, an incidental relic of the physical book-selling process. It would die whether e-books became

Two main points: 1) Exclusive genre is artificial and arbitrary, an incidental relic of the physical book-selling process. It would die whether e-books became popular or not, because people were already shifting their physical book purchasing to the "infinite bookshelves" of Amazon and B&N. E-books are simply the "native format" for the infinite bookshelf. If you can imagine a world where Kindle-compatible e-books were sold offline in brick-and-mortar stores via throwaway SD cards or scannable high-res 2D barcodes, they would end up divided by exclusive genres as well. The pigeonholing of a book into a single genre is a characteristic of the medium of sale, not the actual end format of the book. 2) While we're losing the "nearby book on the shelf" effect, we're replacing it with a vibrant ecosystem of social networks, blogs and forums external to the actual book sale location. When I shop for books, I don't really do it on Amazon - I go there when I know what I want, but I rely on sites like GoodReads[1], Any New Books [2], Twitter (where I follow authors I'm interested in) and Facebook (where I sometimes find recommendations from friends and family) to find my next read. This is definitely a shift, but I find it to be an overwhelming improvement from the old system of going to the bookstore and checking out whatever book's spine catches my eye. It's less arbitrary, it's (hopefully) less subject to manipulation by authors and publishers, and I've enjoyed reading the books chosen this way more. Your mileage may vary, naturally. I think that to a certain extent this is similar to the "filter bubble" mentioned in the context of Google and searching. Having the "infinite bookshelf" and the powerful filtering/tagging makes it easier to find what you want, but it eliminates the natural wandering that some people rely on to be introduced to new things that they wouldn't necessarily look for intentionally. It may be that we simply have to force ourselves to wander a bit if we want variety and novelty, and hopefully the digital world continues to make that easy as well. [1]: http://www.goodreads.com/ http://www.goodreads.com/ [2]: http://anynewbooks.com/ http://anynewbooks.com/