The book is dead: that’s what I hear every time I’m in London or New York. How can a bound stack of printed pages begin to hold us in an age of search-engine attention spans? And why would anyone pick up a novel when she can stream movies around the clock? Publishers these days sometimes look like officers running frantically around the deck of the Titanic; reading a novel can sound about as exciting as riding a horse-drawn cart.

Then I get off a plane in Jaipur, in northern India, to see 600 bodies crowding into a tent to listen to a professor from Harvard or the author of a debut collection of short stories. At the signing lines afterward—which can go on for two hours or more—I’m surrounded by software engineers, C.E.O.’s, and physicians who seem not just to devour every new novel that comes out but to be writing their own on the side. By now around 200 such festivals explode across South Asia every year. But the granddaddy of them all—and the epicenter of many a conversation—is the Jaipur Literature Festival, which draws visitors every winter all the way from Sydney or New England.