The Book is Dead?


“I find television to be very educating. 
Every time somebody turns on the set,
 I go in the other room and read a book.”
Groucho Marx

            The book is celebrating its 555th birthday.
            This romantic notion is based on the approximate publication of the ’42-line’ Gutenberg Bible.  It was not the first book; before Gutenberg there were about 30,000 books in the world.  But it was the big daddy of all printed books and ushered in the Age of the Book.  By the 16th century there were 9 million of them.  Worth celebrating.
            The year is not precise, only feasible.  But there is a bigger issue than accuracy here.  The question: will this birthday be the last?
       New electronic formats are constantly being touted as the end of the book.   All the iPads and Kindles and Nooks.  Meanwhile literary luminaries bemoan the cozy book’s demise at the hand of the cold, engulfing screen.  Page mourners rhapsodize about the feel of the paper, the sharpness of the text, the neatness of the binding, the echo in the library.  Without books our words might just vanish into the thin air like ghosts, they say, and fear a world of screen zombies, cool mules staring and glaring.  Mouse potatoes, the online version of their cousins on the couch.

       I would not write the eulogy yet though because there is always the Rule of Higgeldy-Piggeldy to consider.  This says that it is impossible to accurately predict the shape of things to come since the Gizmos is an evolving system; new developments change the course of change.  This is not to suggest that our future is chaotic, just unplanned.  Our guesses are based on the current state of affairs, which is itself fluid.  That is why predictions of the future always look so quaint in retrospect…like the stream-driven jet packs, the space ships with gas lanterns, and all that.
       The unbook book will undoubtedly evolve in ways that we cannot even imagine yet.  It will become something unexpected, not just a newfangled book, and will probably leave the oldfangled one intact because also at work is the Rule of Uncertain Displacement.  This reminds us how tricky it is to guess which new designs will replace rather than co-exist with existing ones.  While the telephone replaced the telegraph within about 25 years, television and movies have already lived together for 60 years beyond their predicted collision.  And neither of them has put live theater out of business as anticipated.  Paperbacks themselves were expected to finish off hardcovers but, of course, they never did. 
       The lamenters are also operating under the Good Old Days Rule.  What they look back upon with such nostalgia is not a better time, but a more comfortable time...that moment when they last felt cozy in the world.  Read between the lines and you will see that most Luddites want to go back to the point of technology at which their own generation became empowered, but not one moment before.  Typewriters better than computers, for example, but not all the way back to handwriting.  It is familiarity that is at stake more often than quality.
            I love books, have written dozens them, and own hundreds more.  I too revel in the look and feel of them, the intimacy, the portability, familiarity.  Book as furniture, friend, souvenir, memento, weight, link to the past.
            And there are differences between books and screens.  The pixels of light onscreen change the way we read because they glow with energy; scrolling gives no sense of where you are in the experience; hypertext links open the writing up to boundless digression; and online everything is malleable and this marks the end of the impervious word.  Plus we get used to shorter and shorter blocks of text and a very different sense of narrative.
            But digital books have many advantages as well.  They are available to anyone anywhere and make texts more accessible through instant translations, explanations, explications, and cross-references.   Their energy, interactivity, malleability, and brevity can all be seen as positive outcomes just as easily.

            One other factor that appeals to me as a writer is the Dawn of a New Day Rule.  New designs hardly ever just add to what exists, they change the entire system.  New day, new possiblities.  Digital books are not just new technodes, they are the end product of a complex cultural and industrial system that allows writers like me to completely circumvent the whole established structure of agents, editors, publishers…. this essay on my book blog is a perfect example.
            That freedom is exhilarating but it is just this kind of revolution that terrifies the bibliophiles.  They think it will lead to anarchy, a torrent of disposable writing, worthless texts, pointless claptrap published only for fast cash.  I can’t argue with that…in fact I am trying to succeed at it.
            The critics are right in one way and it concerns a basic lesson in Gizmotics…the new always wrecks the old – for better and worse – and history itself proves the point.  These were precisely the concerns – and the inevitable outcomes – of another disruption in the written word, the aftermath of an innovative new technology that threw everyone for a loop about 555 years ago. 
       It was called the book.

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