Clay Shirky, guest blogging on Boing Boing does a nice job of delineating the differences between "Readers" and "book Lovers".

From Aldus Manutius until recently, book lovers have been the most passionate readers. Now they are mostly just the oldest readers. Thanks to digital data, there is a fateful choice to be made between serving lovers of the text and lovers of the page; I think even Manutius would have sided with the readers over the collectors. I hope today's publishers do as well.

It'd be fair to ask why a software developer in upstate New York would participate in such an event. At the first level, I now have a first draft of something that could, with a lot of work, become a fairly decent novel. It's only a first draft, and a rough one at that. But a completed first draft of a novel is more than most people ever produce.

The real value of NaNoWriMo though, is that it is an exercise in discipline and in sustained creativity even in the face of difficulty or lack of inspiration. Miss more than a day or two of the 1667 average daily quota and catching up can become daunting. I learned a lot about writing and about myself during my first NaNoWriMo, and I learned even more this time.

For now, I'm glad it's over. It's nice to have a little free time again. But come next September or October, I imagine I'll be considering possible plots and getting ready for another November of writing.