The New Age of the Book

Marshall McLuhan’s predicted future has not happened. The Web, yes; global immersion in television, certainly; media and messages everywhere, of course. But the electronic age did not drive the printed page into extinction, as McLuhan prophesied in 1962. His vision of a new mental universe held together by post-printing technology now looks dated. If it fired imaginations thirty years ago, it does not provide a map for the millennium that we have just entered. The “Gutenberg galaxy” still exists, and “typographic man” is still reading his way around it.

Consider the book. It has extraordinary staying power. Ever since the invention of the codex in the third or fourth century A.D., it has proven to be a marvellous machine – great for packaging information, convenient to thumb through, comfortable to curl up with, superb for storage, and remarkably resistant to damage. It does not need to be upgraded or downloaded, accessed or booted, plugged into circuits or extracted form webs. Its design makes it a delight to the eye. Its shape makes it a pleasure to hold in the hand. And its handiness has made it the basic tool of learning for thousands of years, even before the library of Alexandria was founded early in the fourth century B.C.

Why then do we continue to hear prophecies about the death of the book? Not because McLuhan was right but because movable type can’t move fast enough to keep up with events. As a consequence electronic books have begun developing. Most of these e-books contain texts that are downloaded from the on-line booksellers and then can be projected onto a screen, one page at a time.

JSTOR, a project developed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has made vast runs of scholarly periodicals available online and purchasable at low prices by libraries. The New York Public Library dispenses so much information electronically to readers all over the world that it reports ten million hits on its computer system each month as opposed to 50,000 books dispensed in its reading room at 42^nd Street. Everything, it seems, is being digitized, and every digit hyperlinked to all the others. If the future brings newspapers without news, journals without pages, and libraries without walls, what will become of the traditional book?

By now, the conventional book has been pronounced dead so often that we shouldn’t be surprised to find that it seems in excellent health. Sales of some books are booming, thanks in part to marketing over the Internet by Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. (American booksellers on the web).

Now that they have computers in their homes, Americans produce and consume more paper with print on it than ever. Even William Gates, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, confessed in a recent speech that he prefers printed page to computer screens for extensive reading:

“…Reading off the screen is still vastly inferior to reading off the paper. Even I, who have these expensive screens and fancy myself as a pioneer of this Web lifestyle, when it comes to something over about four or five pages, I print it out and like to have it to carry around with me and annotate. And it’s quite a hurdle for technology to achieve to match that level of usability”.

Gates says that technology will have to improve “radically” before “all the things we work with on paper today move over into digital form”. In short, the old-fashioned codex, printed on folded and gathered sheets of paper, is not about to disappear into cyberspace.

Electronic books can serve as a specific purpose in the academic world to distribute recent developments and research more effectively and less expensively than the present journal system. As a result, the world of learning will change so rapidly that no one can predict what it will look like ten years from now. But I believe it will remain within the “Gutenberg galaxy” – though the galaxy will expand, thanks to a new source of energy, the e-book, which will act as a supplement to, not a substitute for, Gutenberg’s great machine.

By Robert Darnton

From The New York Review