Call it Ralph Waldo Emerson meets the digital world.

The announcement last week that Houghton Mifflin Co., one of the nation's oldest and largest book publishers, will be acquired by educational and consumer software producer Riverdeep, Inc. is yet another sign that the future of traditional communications tools is without a doubt electronic and Web-based.

Increasingly, reading will take place on a screen.

In my last post to this blog I talked about why books are powerful communications tools, and named a few top business leaders who have written them.

But you don't need to be a superstar like Welch, Gates or Iacocca to write a book. Thomas Stanley and William Danko were marketing professors before publishing The Millionaire Next Door. In fact, according to PublishersMarketplace.com, here are a few others you may not be familiar with who will soon be putting out books:

• Chief business writer of The Economist Matthew Bishop, who has co-authored Philanthrocapitalism, about how capitalism's winners are using their fortunes to change the world;

With so much talk about blogs, podcasts and other new outlets for our messages as communicators, there's one vehicle worth mentioning that's far from new but is still as powerful as ever: books.

I'm not talking about sensational page-turners like the Da Vinci Code or about the next Freakonomics. I'm simply referring to well-written, well-researched statements of a fresh idea or message backed up with plenty of relevant anecdotes, case studes and data. Neatly bound into a book, this content is easy to present and easy for an audience to remember.

While shorter written pieces like op-eds and bylined articles give traction to ideas and messages, books have more bang since they offer four major advantages: