The culture of the book has been in a state of crisis since the age of television, and perhaps goes back even further than that. There are shelves of books and articles by authors who insisted that television would completely take away the joy and pleasure of reading, and the generations growing up with it would become very dull versions of the generation that preceded them. So it isn’t really anything new when contemporary bloggers talk about the internet being the next big criminal when it comes to the printed word.
On many levels, all the charges are correct. Television did indeed have a profound effect on how people perceive, and how they spend their free time, and there’s every reason to suspect the same thing is happening with the web. There are some people certainly who only pick up a book because it is useful, and an automotive repair manual is easier to work with in the garage than an ipad. There are others who will never be entirely disconnected from getting their information in paper form. In the same breath, there are plenty of things to worry about in terms of the future of the book just as there are signs that its next life is already well under way.
The book is an artifact, a physical object that can be opened to reveal a very specific universe, and one that is created by the author with the participation of the reader. As objects, books have a beauty that makes their mystery even more precious. There are as many arguments for their disappearance as there are for the other perspectives. Cultures change, and as cultures change, their relationships to books have also traditionally changed. This is something that also does change the nature of the object itself.
In times where printed matter had an appeal that was limited to those with religious titles and access to religious education, the book was a rare object that had to be bound with materials that could protect it for a very long time. In times when everyone could read on the subway on their way to work, the book became a smaller object on cheaper paper, meant to last only through the space of a few reads. Today, avid readers may very well have only their Jeep Grand Cherokee repair manual in their physical library, but the electronic files might tell a very different story, one that is evolving in new and unexpected directions.
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