Enjoyably pugilistic piece over on the New York Times from executive editor Bill Keller. Punchily entitled "Let's Ban Books, or At Least Stop Writing Them", Keller's piece bemoans the fact that all of his journalists are constantly off writing. "The obvious question", he claims, is "What's up with that?" Why, he goes on to ask, "would anyone want to?"

Keller makes it clear from the off that his interest in this subject is vested. "Every month, it seems, some reporter drops by my office to request a leave of absence to write a book," he sighs.

I patiently explain that book-writing is agony – slow, lonely, frustrating work that, unless you are a very rare exception, gets a lukewarm review (if any), reaches a few thousand people and lands on a remaindered shelf at Barnes & Noble ... But still the reporters – and editors, too – keep coming to sit in my office among the teetering stacks of Times-written books that I mean to read someday and to listen politely to my description of book-writing Gethsemane, and then they join the cliff-bound lemmings anyway.

Fair enough: it must be deeply vexing to have one staff member after another vanishing down the book-writing rabbit hole. There are a fair few offenders at the Guardian, too – though not, strange to say, on the books desk. I guess we're all too busy reading.

But if the comments on the piece are anything to go by, Keller seems to have tapped a deeper and broader vein than the one he was ostensibly aiming for. Amid a few thin voices expressing sympathy for Keller's position, most are vigorous in their rejection of his thesis. My favourite comment so far was from one Bruce Watson, who said of his writing life:

As a former journalist and the author of four narrative histories, I'll tell you why I wanted to write a book. Journalism is "the first rough draft of history" but writing drafts soon seems as ephemeral as yesterday's headlines. Writing and researching, especially if the topic is deeper than a memoir about one's dog, allow a writer to escape the mundane, the puerile, the passing fancies that comprise the present day. To read a good book is to find the same escape. With the rise of Twitter, et al, and the steady decline of book sales, how sad that so many people are choosing to live solely on the surface. This shift will have deep consequences that we are only beginning to see.

Nicely put. I'm with Bruce.