1. Many book heroes tend to be of the “action” sort, the rebel youth, the gutter urchin or the ever-popular illiterate unsuspecting-peasant-who-transition-to-hero (translate this trope to your respective genre as needed – I’m looking at you, young Mr. Skywalker) – not exactly bastions of literary devotion. For those who are more bastion-like, writers often go on about the hero possessing “walls of books” or “piles of books” or otherwise tipping a hat to the hero’s literary prowess during their scene building, and from that one infers that these books (of whatever provenance and/or genre the reader wishes to ascribe to them) are read, not bought by the pound for decorative purposes.

2. Writing about someone reading a book, unless concretely tied into the plot, doesn’t fall under the heading of “stuff that moves the story along,” and therefore is unlikely to be portrayed regardless of the likelihood that the hero reads simply because to do so would be boring and pointless (we don’t see much about them going to the bathroom, either, no matter how many days have passed in novel-time, yet we do not assume that toilets are on the way out in the homes of sci-fi writers and readers).

Infoquake by some guy named Edelman…
Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades by some guy named Scalzi.
American Gods and Ananzi Boys by some guy named Gaiman.

And I’m currently engrossed by Spindrift by Allen Steele. Once I’m done with that, I’m probably going to read his Coyote trilogy. So I wouldn’t be so quick to write off SF just yet.

But it would help matters if the sequel to Infoquake gets finished sometime soon… just sayin’.

The point of most books (and tv as well) is that people are too busy doing exciting and entertaining things to stop and read a book or watch tv. In fact, I once penned a senryu (humanistic haiku) about that very same paradigm:

Watching tv
Watching people
Not watching tv

And that is as it should be. Sounds like someone’s doing too much recursive thinking for their own good.

So what is your character going to call with? A cell phone the size of an atomic nucleus? Telepathy? A superluminal ansible?

But then maybe certain things are going to just get to a point where they can’t improve anymore, and in a thousand years people will be using the same thing. I mean, if a person from the time of Caesar came into my house, he’d be surrounded by devices that were a mystery to him. But when he looked at my broom, he’d say “oh, yeah, I know what that’s for.”