In a recent post on if: book, the blog of The Institute for the Future of the Book, Bob Stein looks at what will replace the book in the futurist digital landscape. He refers to the flattening of all media types and experiences into varieties of apps:

I started to think about the iPad that I'd been using for the past six weeks -- not only for most of my reading, but for playing expressive games like my current favorite, SoundDrop, answering email, surfing the web, watching videos, and listening to music. The iPad has become the center of my media universe, much more than my computer, iPod, or iPhone have ever been. My text used to come in an object we called a book; movies came on tapes, laserdisc, and DVDs, music on records and CDs and games on cartridges and CDs. Now they are all appearing as apps of one sort or another on my iPad.