BOOKS
Bound collections of papers, which, said E. M. Forster, "have to be read. It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West."
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They smelled of dying trees emitting their last breaths. Hardcovered ones often came wearing jackets that were easily marred or lost; the paperback variety had spines that showed the cracks of overuse and pages that turned sallow and brittle with age. They never were the least bit appreciative of
all the shelf space they were given, and really were awfully expensive, compared to your average doorstop or coaster. Municipalities devoted entire buildings to soporific tomes and searched people's bags for them upon exiting (despite the fact that they were encouraging people to take them without paying). Students were particularly susceptible to their wily charms, and so often ended up spending their pittances supporting their habit, even going so far as to invest in thick glasses and particleboard bookcases. It all seemed a big scheme that produced one long, sweet dollar for every publisher that hung up a shingle, and any sorry hack who knew how to double-space a document and address manila envelopes.
Long before used bookstores became headquarters for the world's movers and shakers, there was concern about the possible effects of the written word. In a 1994 lecture, the writer and philosopher Umberto Eco reminded his addressees of Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame: "Comparing a book with his old cathedral, he says: 'Ceci tuera cela' (The book will kill the cathedral, the alphabet will kill images)." Mr. Eco went on to compare this to Socrates's tale of the Pharaoh Thamus, who discouraged the invention of writing, warning that if people knew how to put pen to paper, they'd no longer memorize anything, and this would lead to torpid minds and a weakened civilization.
Indeed.
Ever since electronic and audiobooks began gaining attention in the late 1900s, there has been speculation that a new ceci might finally do the tuera-ing. Hopes were further stoked in 2000 when Stephen King's digitally released thriller Riding the Bullet sold six hundred thousand copies in just 48 hours. At the end of 2005, the audiobook industry's annual revenue was approaching $1 billion a year. Just months later, Sony introduced the Sony Reader Digital Book, which was a kind of portable computer that could download books; in 2007, Amazon followed suit with a similar device called the Kindle (a name which brought to mind the pleasant image of burning paper). Books that might've been filled with ideas were finally being distilled down to little more than strings of zeroes and ones; in an increasingly crowded world, why store concepts and couplets in objects that take up so much mass? A story that exists only on an LCD screen still offers up a plot that can be mined by a screenwriter.
Yet the popularity of these reusable gadgets, which were roughly the same size as a book, suggested that there maybe were some people out there who weren't yet ready to forgo the experience of holding text in their hands; perhaps they were just embracing a way to do it without killing trees and getting paper cuts. Some prayed that these devices had solved the problem-even Mr. Eco, who's made millions from the sales of old-fashioned paperbacks, said "I receive too many books every week. If the computer network succeeds in reducing the quantity of published books, this would be a paramount cultural improvement."
Many, however, grumbled that there was no way that these miniscreens could ever supplant the elegant simplicity of a book. The invention of sliding doors, they argued, didn't render hinges unnecessary; people still devoted their lives to painting even after the development of photography. There were also those who straddled both sides, arguing that one format might be able to inform the other, and vice versa: Isn't it possible that out-of-print books could find new life in a digitized form? Perhaps texts that were initially released online would end up getting printed for posterity?
Maybe. The only problem with these postulations is that they all start with the basic assumption that people want to read, and that kind of thinking might just make an "ass" out of "u" and "mption." According to a 2007 poll conducted by the Associated Press, more than a quarter of Americans read less than one book per year; if they're reading at all, it usually involves skimming text on computer screens laden with bullet points, short paragraphs, and pictures. This looks like adieu, cela.
