Mr. Smuk was exaggerating, of course; the first person to jailbreak the Verse was not a second grader but a middle-school student from Michoacán, Mexico. In the weeks following her success — as hacking how-tos flitted across social media and bootlegged narratives flooded the market — it became clear that the Verse was not destined to be the next big vehicle for proprietary storytelling, selling experiences for $49.99 each. Instead, to the collective chagrin of Amazon’s stockholders, it was destined to end proprietary storytelling.

Hacked Verses were followed by 3D-print replicas and drugstore knockoffs, which were followed by apps that allowed users to record and share their own sensory experiences, which produced the lawless infinity of virtual realities we know and love today. Eight years later, the Verse and its offspring have killed or at least critically wounded every other media format, from print publishing to Hollywood. Why read comic books when you can live them, leaping tall buildings in single bounds, doing whatever spiders can? Why sit in a movie theater, surrounded by the stale salt smell of popcorn, when you can ride the fury road yourself, shiny and chrome?

If you’re reading this today, it’s likely you’re an anachronism yourself: someone who grew up in the era of library cards and Sunday morning newspapers, someone who loved books too much to let them go. But what was it you loved, really? Surely it wasn’t the bleached-wood-pulp and acid-free ink, but what the books contained: the epics and tragedies, the memoirs and mysteries, the 10,000 ways we’ve escaped and explained the human experience for centuries. The stories.

And stories existed long before 1439. Stories are shape-shifters, infinite and immortal: They’ve been painted on the walls of Chauvet Cave and pressed into clay tablets; sung by griots in the streets of Old Mali and cut into the Peruvian desert; danced and drummed and whispered, spun like spider-silk across the Atlantic and painted on the undersides of overpasses. In the context of human history, the book was nothing but a format, a brief technological quirk in the history of human storytelling, younger than theater but older than soap operas.

I am not, I confess, a neutral commentator. I am an experienced author (a title that can now be claimed by “any trailer-park teenager with spare time and a phone,” as one ex-novelist, Richard Chevy, complained). I work primarily in scent and sound, collaborating with other authors to build a five-sense narrative. It’s true that authors like me don’t conform to the Western ideal of “the Author” — a lone white male sweating whiskey over his typewriter, perhaps pausing to light another cigarette and glare at the horizon — but I fail to see how telling stories with smell and touch, with petrichor and heat and the shadows of leaves on pavement, is inherently inferior to telling them with words.

Mr. Chevy’s comment about trailer-park teenagers was a reference to the Williams Brothers’ “Atlantic/s,” a critically acclaimed experience that contains only a single, lovingly detailed scene: a sagging double-wide somewhere off the Carolina coast, lightly mildewed, door swinging in the breeze. “It’s hardly Faulkner,” said one reviewer. “It’s hardly even a story.”

Timaeus Williams and his three younger brothers were forced to abandon their home in 2034; the trailer preserved in “Atlantic/s” is now 20 feet below sea level, the Spanish moss replaced by seaweed. Is there not a story in the wordless hum of marshland, the too-close crash of the waves? Is there anything more Faulknerian than the restless ghost of a South that no longer exists, murdered by human hubris? How much of this supposed mourning is merely the petulance of people encountering — apparently for the first time — stories that weren’t written by and for people just like them?