If raw resources (tree cutting) and manufacturing (book binding) is saturated, a fully-realized economy has just one step left: financialization.

You have to start finding ways to keep people hooked on books and make it a part of their regular lifestyle. One book can't be enough, and after a while you have to convince them to replace the books they already bought. New editions, Author's Footnotes, limited run release, all of the stops have to be pulled out to get consumers to show up en-masse. Because that's what they are - consumers, not readers - wallets to be squeezed until they're bled of all the trust they had in media.

I think about the publications I liked reading as a kid, like Joystiq and Polygon. Some of the best games journalism the industry produced, but inevitably doomed to fail as their competitors monetized further. The rest of traditional media has followed the same path, converging on some mercurial social network marketing tactic as the placeholder for big-picture brand strategy.