Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman's famous saying – "nobody knows anything" – might now equally be applied to the world of books. Every week brings yet more confusing news from the digital frontline.

From America, it's reported that screens are now so ubiquitous that handwriting is dead. In Britain, bookselling is said to be on the rocks, with alternative media all-conquering. No question: Penguin and Random House merged, defensively, to combat the threat of Amazon. No one yet knows the outcome of that manoeuvre.

There is, however, one certainty that book lovers can feel good about. Despite the prophets of doom, this is a golden age of reading in all media: from iPhones and iPads to Kindles and Nooks, to enhanced hardbacks and collectors' editions. Consumption of the printed word is at an all-time high.

Last year, the Pew Research Centre, an independent thinktank, reported that people under 30 were now reading more books than they were 10 years ago, and in more formats than ever before. We know this anecdotally, from experience. Step on to any bus, plane or train. A majority will be engrossed in the written word, in some form.

Set aside our attachment to the aesthetic experience of the bound book, and this can quickly become less a vision of hell than a surprisingly encouraging picture: a world of living words, transmitted to readers everywhere.

Far from celebrating, however, many readers, finding themselves in the middle of dislocating change, seem more baffled than enlightened. We can get access to information about absolutely everything, but the facility remains disabling. We have the knowledge. But we are slow to engage with it in a productive way.

As George Orwell, writing in the Observer, once put it: "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." Talk of the future, and some commentators will frame it as a struggle between old and new, print and digital, between ink and chips, so to speak. Break out of that matrix, and the talk about the importance of "digital platforms" becomes less intimidating.

One landmark we can find in this storm of change is the certainty of "content". It's what, not how, you're reading that matters. From this derives one intriguing possible outcome.

If the next generation of Amazon managers, weary of distribution's nuts and bolts, got interested in exercising some cultural muscle, it's possible they might put some of their colossal resources to the service of a new publishing model. Far-fetched? Not really. Book publishing began with bookselling. Amazon could equal Penguin Random House Redux.