People invented books, and they are not precious. We can change them, and adapt them to suit our needs. We crafted the pen to write them- and then moveable type and the Heidelberg press to distribute them on a massive scale. The book has changed and morphed and been re-shaped over time, to meet new demands. From monk-transcribed single editions, to leather-bound encyclopedias and pulp fiction paperbacks, the book has been inextricably linked to the progression of human history.
The concept of the book will never die, but its format will forever be changing. Books will very likely be phased out within the next century, replaced by tablets that relay information instantly. The internet has already done so much to ‘kill’ the book- physically published information is considered out-of-date as soon as it hits the editor’s desk. On a related note, citizen publishing has brought the newspaper into its death throes. Twitter is providing more up-to-date information on a global scale than the television can provide- the book can’t match this pace.
For what purpose does a book serve but to provide a permanent copy of information? Is it really permanent, though? Books can be destroyed, or worse- forgotten. Despite the fact that we still can’t find an acceptable way to remove ink stains from our shirts and blouses, ink is not a permanent invention. Unpurchased books go to die in landfills, and controversial ones are burned by those who disagree with their contents. The tangible form of the book is no longer reliable. Books are heavy, cumbersome, and the oldest books can’t even be touched by human hands lest the acid destroy their delicate pages. What good is a book if it can’t serve its intended purpose?
I’ve read that people are worrying about the advent of citizen publishing because they say that this spells the death of books. I’ve heard claims that the next generation of students may have difficulty reading through old prose because they’ll be so accustomed to new forms of relaying information- in chunks and sentences, as opposed to chapters and volumes. I’d like to argue (in an unacademic way) that this isn’t a cause for concern. Just as we have academics who choose to spend all of their waking hours in libraries, reading through ancient texts to divulge meaning from those words, we will always have people who choose to study the old, and those who choose to produce the new. The book will die, but its foundations will not. There will always be content to publish- and whether it’s written in an old-style or new-style, it will be made available to the entire world. The economy of written text has changed dramatically in the past 500 years, and what was said with the lyrical rhyming scheme of sonnets is now said in the shorter stanzas of conceptual rock albums. People were fearful then of the loss, as they are now, but progress pushed out the old methodologies. Their core ideas, however, have been maintained for hundreds of years.
I’m not going to be alive in the day that words are no longer used to convey the message that books carry, but I know that as the world shifts towards a more open-source method of publishing, new language conventions will be developed to convey information in ways I can’t even fathom right now. Whether or not this is a good thing is completely subjective. I’m excited to be living in a world that is constantly changing- and I hope that I live long enough to see another massive shift in the way that information is provided to others in an open and egalitarian way.
Note: I still love books- I’m enamoured by the way they smell and feel, and I’m sure I’ll never embrace a 100% paper-free existence. I expect my potential great-grandchildren will be fine with it, though.