{"id":139609,"date":"2019-09-17T09:07:43","date_gmt":"2019-09-17T13:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=139609"},"modified":"2019-09-18T13:43:04","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T17:43:04","slug":"books-wont-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/09\/17\/books-wont-die\/","title":{"rendered":"Books Won\u2019t Die"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Illustration by Albert Robida, for \u201cThe End of the Books,\u201d by Octave Uzanne, published in Scribner\u2019s Magazine<\/em>, vol. 16, no 2, August 1894. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

Increasingly, people of the book are also people of the cloud. At the Codex Hackathon, a convention whose participants spend a frenetic weekend designing electronic reading tools, I watch developers line up onstage to pitch book-related projects to potential collaborators and funders. \u201cUber for books\u201d: a same-day service that would deliver library volumes to your door. \u201cFitbit for books\u201d: an app that blocks incoming calls and buzzes your phone with reminders to get back to a book. That literary pedometer meets its real-world counterpart in LitCity: \u201cImagine walking down a city street and feeling that familiar buzz of a push notification. But instead of it being a notification on Twitter or a restaurant recommendation, it\u2019s a beautiful passage from a work of literature with a tie to that place.\u201d I thought back to the nineteenth-century guidebooks that inserted a snippet of Shelley next to their map of the Alps; the book has always been about bringing worlds together.<\/p>\n

Some projects return to the decades-old premise of electronic enhancements or \u201cenrichments,\u201d which went during the aughts under the ungainly name of \u201cvooks.\u201d SubText overlays digitized works of literature with annotations and images; BookPlaylist synchronizes a text with background music. Then again, perhaps print books aren\u2019t the ones whose poverty needs to be remedied: other projects feel like pale electronic imitations of features that print books have long taken for granted. Rebook generates digital \u201cassociation copies\u201d (remember Obama swearing in on Lincoln\u2019s Bible) by allowing readers to give away ebooks that they\u2019ve underlined or annotated. Cover Design History catalogs the dust jackets too often lost when books are digitized or even just discarded by libraries, while Gavel uses snapshots of book covers to generate and summarize reviews (as in, \u201cyou can\u2019t judge a book by \u2026\u2009\u201d).<\/p>\n

One of the problems being solved is death. Would a diagnosis of terminal cancer be softened by an app that helps you divvy up your books among your heirs? The book may not be dying, but its users seem sensitive to their own mortality. Fahrenheit<\/em> 451 <\/em>ends with characters rescuing books from a biblioclastic regime by choosing a book to \u201cbecome.\u201d You can take a love of reading to mean preserving a threatened past; you can also understand it as a spur to imagining what new forms books might take in the future. <\/p>\n

In his 1992 magazine article \u201cThe End of Books,\u201d which launched a thousand eulogies for the book as we knew it, Robert Coover took \u201cbook\u201d to mean a gathering of printed pages mass-produced on spec to be sold to anonymous strangers in exchange for hard cash. His assumption, we can see now, would have surprised a Victorian circulating-library patron or an eighteenth-century subscriber to a hand-circulated news sheet. But Coover\u2019s understanding of what a book is and what a book does would have been equally hard-pressed to include the Free Press\u2019s wares.<\/p>\n

In 1992, hyperlinks were the killer app. Coover\u2019s title punned on the page-turning powers of the codex, which sweeps novel readers inexorably from Page 1 to The End. (The codex replaced the scroll, millennia before Bible.com, precisely because it allowed early Christians to flip hyperactively through their scriptures.) Yet chronology makes it hard to believe that the hyperlink was killing the book, because that metaphor predates the web. In 1835, Th\u00e9ophile Gautier\u2019s novel Mademoiselle<\/em> de Maupin <\/em>declared that \u201cthe newspaper is killing the book, as the book killed architecture.\u201d Gautier was one-upping Victor Hugo\u2019s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame<\/em>, which depicted an archdeacon worrying that the book would kill the cathedral and a bookseller complaining that newfangled printing presses were killing scribes\u2019 trade. This nineteenth-century historical novel is set a quarter century after Gutenberg\u2019s first Bible, when a thriving industry of manuscript-on-demand was forced to readjust.<\/p>\n

In hindsight, we can see how rarely one technology supersedes another: the rise of the podcast makes clear that video didn\u2019t doom audio any more than radio ended reading. Yet in 1913, a journalist interviewing Thomas Edison on the future of motion pictures recounted the inventor declaring confidently that \u201cbooks \u2026 will soon be obsolete in the public schools.\u201d By 1927 a librarian could observe that \u201cpessimistic defenders of the book \u2026 are wont to contrast the actual process of reading with the lazy and passive contemplation of the screen or listening to wireless, and to prophecy the death of the book.\u201d And in 1966, Marshall McLuhan stuck books into a list of outdated antiques: \u201cclotheslines, seams in stockings, books and jobs\u2014all are obsolete.\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout the nineteenth century and again in the twentieth, every generation rewrote the book\u2019s epitaph. All that changes is whodunnit. Gautier\u2019s culprit was a very real historical phenomenon: the daily papers emerging in 1835 thanks to broader literacy, the metal press invented around 1800, and steam printing shortly thereafter. Later sci-fi writers imagined a succession of replacements: \u201cfonografic\u201d recordings (Library Journal<\/em>, 1883), \u201ctelephonic sermons\u201d (Edward Bellamy, 1887), VCR-like \u201cBabble Machines\u201d (H.\u2009G. Wells, 1899), microfilm-esque \u201creading-machine bobbins\u201d (Aldous Huxley, 1932), and \u201cspools which projected books\u201d (Ray Bradbury, 1948). In 1885, the French librarian R. Balmer gave the names of \u201cwhispering-machine\u201d and \u201cmetal automatic book\u201d to something that sounds uncannily like an audiobook. Its user \u201cwould place the machine in the hat, and have the sounds conveyed to the ear by wires.\u201d Besides curing eyestrain, these \u201creading machines\u201d would \u201cpermit of the pursuit simultaneously of physical and of mental improvement.\u201d Translation: instead of hunching over desks, intellectuals would be free to jog. And with both hands free, their wives could read while dishwashing: \u201cThe problem of the higher education of woman would be triumphantly solved.\u201d<\/p>\n

The more spandex jumpsuits, the fewer leather-bound volumes: the future was recognizable by its bookshelf-bare walls. The Enlightenment visionary Louis-S\u00e9bastien Mercier predicted that in the year 2440, the sprawling book stacks of the Royal Library would have been condensed into a single volume. Like a chemist distilling botanical essences, Mercier explained, the editors of the future would \u201cextract the substance of thousands of volumes, which they have included in a small duodecimo\u201d\u2014scaled somewhere between an iPod and an iPad.<\/p>\n

History proved Mercier right in one sense: the future lay not with expanding information, but compacting it. By 1961, the Polish fantasist Stanislaw Lem pictured bookshelves squeezed onto what we would now call an e-reader, supplemented by what we would now call print on demand.<\/p>\n

All my purchases fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles \u2026 They can be read with the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it \u2026 As a rule, a bookstore had only single \u201ccopies\u201d of books, and when someone needed a particular book, the contents of the work was recorded in a crystal. The originals\u2014Crystomatrices\u2014were not to be seen; they were kept behind pale blue enamel steel plates. So a book was printed, as it were, every time someone needed it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Four years later, Frank Herbert\u2019s doorstop-size Dune <\/em>conjured up a \u201cBible made for space travelers. Not a filmbook, but actually printed on filament paper.\u201d Herbert measured the book, like thumb drives and PalmPilots, against a human body: thanks to a \u201cmagnifier and electrostatic charge system,\u201d the unabridged volume would take up less space than the joint of your finger.<\/p>\n

The term \u201cebook\u201d endorses such optimism. Whatever replaces the codex, it implies, will be functionally equivalent: the same textual content in a new and improved (usually shrunken) package. A darker strain of futurology, in contrast, emphasizes political decline over technological progress. Fahrenheit 451<\/em> represents book burning as an end in itself, not just a means to suppressing sedition whose medium happens to be print. A few years earlier, 1984 <\/em>opened with the purchase of a \u201cthick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.\u201d A blank notebook speaks louder than a printed volume: \u201cEven with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.\u201d The final piece of evidence of thoughtcrime that sends Winston Smith to Room 101? A paperweight found in his possession. Here, as in Amtrak\u2019s Quiet Car, the idea of the book remains more powerful than any ideas that it contains.<\/p>\n

Fiction has been better at predicting the invention of cylinder books and filament books, or the survival of marbled pages and glass paperweights, than at imaging what as-yet-unborn institutions might in the future carve out room to read. Even the writers whose imaginations run riot in picturing new machines for viewing and storing text either give no space to libraries, bookstores, and postal systems, or imagine those intermediaries as mirror images of their own era. On the eve of World War I, one humorist imagined a day in the life of a late-twentieth-century household:<\/p>\n

There was a knock at the front door, and the young people slid up the moving stairway, anticipating the parcel of books delivered each morning by the public library aeroplane service. They returned disconsolate; it was only the sterilized milk. \u201cYou youngsters don\u2019t know what hardships are,\u201d said the elderly uncle; \u201cwhen I was a lad, back in 1913, I used to get up at nine o\u2019clock in the morning and walk the length of the street to get a book from a Carnegie Library.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The librarian fed up with \u201cthe death of the book\u201d in 1927 predicts more darkly that in the future \u201cwe shall press a button, or turn a handle, and receive the books selected by ourselves\u2014or much more probably by some paternal committee.\u201d In the decade when Orwell\u2019s dystopia is set, the pulp magazine Planet<\/em> Stories <\/em>ran Ray Bradbury\u2019s second most famous book-burning fable, \u201cPillar of Fire.\u201d Washed up in the twenty-fourth century, its time traveler heads straight for the library. For even in a society that torches horror fiction, circulation desks still exist, and their attendants still ask, \u201cMay I help you?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d like to \u2018have\u2019 Edgar Allan Poe.\u201d His verb was carefully chosen. He didn\u2019t say \u201cread.\u201d He was too afraid that books were pass\u00e9, that printing itself was a lost art. Maybe all \u201cbooks\u201d today were in the form of fully delineated three-dimensional motion pictures.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However the terms change, fiction makes the place where books are read, had, or received a comforting constant.<\/p>\n

Not so in real life. If you believe that infrastructures have consistently done more to shape reading than have this or that device, then the question becomes not whether we read in print or online or in some as-yet-unimagined medium but rather in the interactions through which we get our hands on books\u2014and even more fundamentally, the interactions that awaken a desire for them. Writers who foresaw space travel, time travel, and virtual reality still failed to imagine that libraries that provide more digital and print service than ever before might nonetheless find their staffs fired and replaced by volunteers; their survival dependent on self-help books prescribed by doctors; their Carnegie-era premises sold off to for-profit companies that turn their vaulted reading rooms into private gyms where books are ingested, if at all, through earphones on the treadmill. Whatever its medium, I\u2019m confident that the experience of immersion in a world made of words will survive if and only if readers continue to carve out places and times to have words with one another. As for the marbled notebooks, they can take their chances.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Leah Price is distinguished professor of English at Rutgers University, where she founded the Initiative for the Book. This piece is excerpted from her latest book, <\/em>What We Talk about When We Talk about Books: The History and Future of Reading<\/a>, which was published last month by Basic Books.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2019 by Leah Price.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Relax. Predictions of the impending obsolescence of books have been proven wrong time and again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1843,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBooks Won\u2019t Die by Leah Price<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Relax. 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