In reality, a Youtube video or podcast only go so far, and they cannot really substitute for writing in terms of being information carriers. Admittedly, I do listen to Poe’s “New Books in History” podcast, because it gives me something intelligent to listen to in the car and when walking around the park with my iPod and headphones. But every time I hear something that I want to note, annotate or bookmark, I can’t. I have to remember to write down my thoughts when I get back to my computer.

This is the main point: the codex book (and digital technologies that partly imitate and further improve on the codex, like an HTML webpage or PDF file) is really the greatest invention when it comes to storing information. It’s instant access: you can flip to a page and find the exact sentence containing a useful piece of information. Try doing that so easily with a Youtube video or MP3 file: it will be much more frustrating to locate a particular passage, and it will certainly be impossible to annotate the speaker’s thoughts without using expensive software.

“Hitchens made his living as an impolite but often persuasive contrarian whose amusing performances, in person and in writing, were designed to reduce even the most ancient and imaginative hopes and dreams to the size of a pragmatically hopeless six-foot man who proclaimed proudly God Is Not Great – and Mother Teresa wasn’t much better.”