I'll readily acknowledge that for a number of years now in my educational capacities whenever a question related to performing some sort of task - digital or not - has come up my first suggestion has been to run a YouTube search starting with "how do I ...". Pretty consistently people succeed in finding a video that runs them through the required steps - even for the most mundane tasks. That's almost always more useful than a textual explanation.

But text is a time machine. It takes us back to any era during which people wrote (and their texts were preserved) and it allows us to converse with people whom we've never met or whom we can no longer meet. If Schank is right that books are going away, we may still find ways to communicate with the future, but we'll certainly lose our ability to communicate with the past.