Whatever happened to plain English?

Greeting from the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The second speaker is Mark Pesce, of Future St Consulting. His topic is "Whatever Happened to the Book?". So far he seems to have said that commercial content providers do not like to hyperlink outside their own web site, that the web encourages brief easily understood items and e-books are different to paper books. Perhaps he has some other non-obvious point he is trying to make, but I am having difficulty understanding what he is saying due to all the big words being used and convoluted sentences. He seems to be reading out a paper for a university paper (or something for Fibreculture). Perhaps it is just that I am so used to brief simple online expression and can't cope with old fashioned substantive expression and am too used to short, clear, easy to understand online expression.