Taking the long view, this does not seem a surprising
development. Such radical change in
reading media has taken place before. The
development of the codex (i.e. the book with pages) from the scroll and
development of moveable type that made writing books long hand unnecessary are
two obvious examples. Moreover, as Zender
points out, in the same way that from our current point of view the use of the
printing press had advantages that made continued writing of books by long hand
seemed doomed to obsolescence, the modern ebook (or any “book” on electronic
media) has the advantage of being
cheaper, more portable and easier to replace than hard copy books, making the
continued production of traditional books
other than as an art form unlikely to continue very far into the future.
Writing this, I am sitting in my own library surrounded by
shelves and shelves of books. As someone who loves the physical feel of a book,
who likes sitting with a cup of coffee
and relaxing sprawled in a comfortable chair with a book on
my lap, or simply pulling a book off of
a shelf and diving at random into the mind of some person at a distant place
and time, the prospect that a generation after my death all of this will be
mulch, or at best, vying for a spot on Antique’s Roadshow, is a bit
daunting. At the same time, as Zender
points out, the scribe who worked by hand on manuscripts not doubt looked in
the same way at the advent of the printed book with the same sense mixture of concern
and wistfulness – as though some integral part of the civilization he knew and
that seemed natural to him were being lost.
Nothing is going to stop the continued advent of the
technological revolution. It isn’t even
an advent anymore, but an established fact.
Those of us old fogies who are refugees from the world of books and
think that because we happen to be on Facebook that somehow we have made the
transition should take another look at our lifeboat. It’s already sinking. Our
children’s children’s world will be a new one, speaking a language that we are
probably constitutionally incapable of learning. There is neither praise nor
blame in this. It is simply the way that
history is moving. I never rode to school
on a horse as my father did, but we both got to where we had to go.
Being the visually oriented person I am, though, I do feel
luck to have been born into history at time when print was at its apogee. When you stop to think that before Gutenberg
only the very rich could afford books and that it is only that for the past one
hundred years of our country that most people are even literate and books
readily available, it has been a great time to be alive. Except for this very recent time, culture has
been predominantly oral. The bulk of the
population did not learn by reading or communicate through print – they talked
and listened. I think that I would have been a very bad fit for that kind of
culture being both poor at expressing myself orally and not much better at
remembering what I hear. With the unrepentant ramping up of electronic media,
the chances are that we are returning to an oral culture once again. Writing has become tweeting and it won’t be
too long before the keyboard is obsolete.
We’ll simply talk to the computer and it will answer us. We will be able eliminate the intervening
printed media. It is more than just a bit ironic that those who used to laugh
at the idea of the stereotypic paternalistic boss who dictated to his secretary
rather than simply write for himself will once again, in effect return to
dictating, albeit with an electronic secretary.
As Zender points out, books made of
paper won’t disappear overnight. Those of us born into the print culture will
continue to read and buy them (that is until book stores turn totally into
Kindle and Nook stations) and we will still sit down and read those same
storybooks our parents read to us to our grandchildren, passing on a tradition
even as it ceases to be. I’m not writing
a requiem. Quite the opposite. It is fascinating being poised on this point
in history, both able to look back on the history that has made us who we are,
and looking forward to what the future might be for those that come after us.
In the short run, however, I think I will just get up and grab a book from the
shelf.