Two years ago, a writer in the New York Times Magazine imagined a future for books in the digital age that nearly made John Updike's famous shock of white hair stand on end.

Some not so distant day, the writer posited, everything ever written would be available with a quick Google search. Writers would feel free to swipe snippets from each other's work and use it in their own. Everything would be free on the Internet, "a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas."

With no market, then, for the physical book, authors would make their living through public appearances. The Times writer seemed breathless about the possibilities. And Updike, who died Tuesday at age 76, was breathless, too - at the sheer audacity of such a thought.

I will never forget him standing before booksellers at the annual industry trade show, BookExpo America, just a few days after the article was published. He seemed visibly shaken by the piece.

"Has the electronic revolution pushed us so far down the path of celebrities . . . that an author's signed works serve primarily as his or her ticket to the lecture platform?" he wondered aloud. He called the writer's vision a "grisly scenario."

When I interviewed him afterward, he seemed bone-weary and somewhat befuddled at this new virtual world. He ran his hands tenderly over the cover of his new novel, and spoke about how carefully he had chosen the slightly purplish black color.

"There used to be a rainbow of colors for cloth. Now it's down to basic black," he lamented. "This had to be ordered from Holland."

He didn't understand the "me-minded" world of blogs; it seemed like one giant, egocentric game to him.

As for his writing, he admitted he was running out of things to say. In short, he was getting old. And like a pack of coyotes circling around a weak prey about to drop, some bloggers later took him apart for his dismissive notions of what they were all about. I always felt sorry that my article had provided fodder for their attacks. It seemed an unnecessarily cruel way to treat someone who had contributed so much to American letters, however outdated he was becoming.

And, yes, there was that.

In recent years, Updike, admittedly, wasn't always at the top of his game when it came to his fiction. Though many critics disagreed, I remember his 1997 novel Toward the End of Time as bizarre and disjointed, falling back on his by-then well-worn themes of sex and death. Terrorist, released in 2006, was a valiant effort to try and get into the mind of a suicide bomber, but it was clunky and contrived. The joints creaked; the characters often paraded about like puppets.

I haven't read The Widows of Eastwick, but critics concurred that it was no match for the book that spawned it: The Witches of Eastwick.

Oddly enough, my favorite fiction of Updike's in recent years, Bech At Bay, was just a minor trifle for the author, a collection of several interrelated stories reprising his character Henry Bech, an aging literary writer. In one story that still amuses me to consider, Bech dreams up a scheme to poison critics. If I recall correctly, it involved them licking poisoned envelopes.

If he had had the chance to revisit that story before he died, the people licking the envelopes might have been bloggers - or The New York Times writer who dared envision a future in which a shy, gentle man like Updike would give his finest work away on the Internet, and make his living running around the country like a carnival sideshow.

Given such a future, we might all breathe a sigh of relief at today's news. How sad it will be for writers everywhere if it turns out that death came for Updike just in the nick of time.