The Death of Books and the Continuity of Stories in Modernity

I have been turning something over in my mind recently. From creation until around 400 BC (different date for different regions) stories took the form of oral tradition. Think about the Epic of Gilgamesh or The Iliad. I know that oral tradition left the culture earlier in some places (Babylon) and later in others (Britain), but the gist is sound I think. There is always overlap in a paradigm shift. Thomas Kuhn and Neil Postman have discussed this in science and technology. I am combining their discussions in a cultural way.
From 400 BC until AD 1940, stories took the form of written documents. From scrolls to books, written stories were the way people got their stories. From Herodotus to Rudyard Kipling, the written narrative was the place to find stories. But another paradigm shift took place around the 1940's that unseated the written narrative as the dominant means of story communication. I mean film, of course, the visual narrative.
From the 1940's onward, we have been increasingly getting our cultural stories from visual narratives. It is no longer the norm for people to rush to the bookstore when a new novel is published, unless that new novel is a J.K. Rowling fantasy narrative or a Stephanie Meyer vampire bit. But it is quickly becoming the norm for the season premier of Lost to unseat even the President's State of the Union Address. The competition is over. Visual narratives have won.
We are still in the vast overlap of this shift, so you can still get written narratives of stories. You can even get written forms of movies and television programs. But this will eventually happen less and less, I think. The more dominant trend is for written narratives to be transformed into visual narratives.
So what does this mean for those of us who want to know the stories of our generation? Well, it depends on whether those stories are worth knowing. I found the overall story of the X-Files to be very good. thoroughly enjoyed Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. I have liked most of the stories of the Star Trek manifestations. I was captivated by Alias, until it self-destructed (same problem with the Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean movies). I am currently following Lost and sometimes the Mentalist.
Like literature, we go with what intrigues us and we pick up trivia about the rest. The commercials and previews are about all I need to know about Desperate Housewives, probably more than I need to know. Just like you pick up a book and read its dust jacket, or over time get to have a feel for certain genres, we determine what we watch as well. Just because it is a book, doesn't mean you have to read it. Just because it in the theaters doesn't mean you have to watch it.