It probably won't make me terribly popular around here, but I'd say books have lost their informational function, and these days are used primarily for signaling sophistication.

On nearly any subject, you'll get vastly more useful knowledge from googling than from reading any book.

This argument doesn't apply to fiction or to entertainment-value non-fiction - only for sources of serious learning. Linear non-interactive format is simply horrible at getting knowledge anywhere, and brains are great at filtering this out.