Books at the Millennium:
Metamorphosis or Death?

Mark W. Sorensen

"I cannot live without books."
Thomas Jefferson

"Don't buy me a book; I gotta book."
Jean Harlow

"Reports of my death are grossly exaggerated," quoth the Book, "nothing more." With the approach of the two thousandth anniversary of the common era calendar, many prophets of doom are predicting death and destruction for the bound printed page. But futurists have a tendency to write the obituaries of old technologies long before they are finished. Although predicted, the advent of the telegraph and the telephone in the last century did not put an end to written communications. The proliferation of motion pictures, radio and television during the past 75 years threatened but did not destroy the printed page. In fact, these new technologies have only served to create an interest in books that did not exist before (e.g. Internet for Dummies).

This article will illustrate that since its development, whether carved in stone or penned on calf skin, the written word has withstood several changes in technology. Although the medium has varied, there has always been something special about interpreting the message by using a tactile object such as a book. I propose that the digital information explosion will not destroy the book, but rather will affect and shape its use in the future. However, because many people and economic forces are working to promote only their digital interests, librarians must help the book through continued work in the areas of literacy and preservation.

Although we tend to exaggerate the effects of technical changes and how fast they may take place, there seems to be much agreement about the fact that we are in the midst of a massive electronic communication revolution. Starting with Marshall McLuhan in the early 1950s, writers have focused first on television and now on digitized information taking over the function of books. The consensus is that we are in an age of communication transition from print to electronic media. These authors compare our current situation to that faced by Western civilization several times during the past 3,000 years. Professor Robert Escarpit thought these changes in communication technology were so significant that he referred to them as "mutations" (See Escarpit, 1966, Chapter 1).

Before presenting the views of representative writers who are sounding the death knell for books, I will review briefly how books evolved in the first place. Because of the limited scope of this article, I will concentrate and explain this development from a Eurocentric viewpoint. In this explanation, the development of language and media are often inseparable.

Roughly 3,500 years before the common era, pictographs (pictures representing things) were produced in all parts of the world. By 1500 BCE, ideographs (drawing representing ideas) emerged in several cultures. Syllabic writing (signs representing sounds of separate syllables) developed in a few cultures, such as Japan, but did not become universal. It was the creation and modification of the alphabet, a limited number of signs to represent all of the sounds of language, that helped "jump start" the first communications revolution (see Harley and Hampden, 1964).

In terms of media, cuneiform writing was baked into small clay tablets throughout the Middle East beginning as early as 3000 BCE. Making use of another medium at hand, Hammurabi had his law code chiseled into stone stelae in the 18th century BCE. These stone pillars were set around the kingdom and people had to pass by a stele to get the message, which of course didn't change very often. (This symbolizes part of the current debate about the permanence of ideas written in books versus ideas written on the ever-changing computer screen. The philosophy of cybernauts might be: "This is what I think this minute, but it's 'not carved in stone.'"). It was, however, the

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crisscrossing and pressing of the fibrous stems of river reeds that helped produce what we might liken to a "book." According to Professor Escarpit, "writing enabled the word to conquer time, but the book enabled it to conquer space." When phonetic alphabets were combined with lightweight papyrus, it was possible to copy long texts quickly and easily, as well as easily transport many copies to any destination (Escarpit, 1966, p. 18).

Sheets of papyri were eventually pasted together to make long strips of writing material called "volumen" or scrolls. The library at Alexandria had more than 300,000 handwritten scrolls in its collection when it was destroyed. By the time of Julius Caesar, papyrus scrolls had replaced clay and wax tablets as the medium of written communication. Canadian historian Harold Innis wrote, "The concepts of time and space reflect the significance of media to civilization. Media that emphasize time are those that are durable in character, such as parchment, clay and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture. Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper. The later are suited to wide areas in administration and trade" (Innis, 1972, p. 7. University of Illinois Professor James W. Carey harshly criticized the scholarship and ideas of both Innis and fellow Canadian McLuhan for their attempts to make the history of mass media central to the history of civilization at large. His critique can be found beginning at page 270 in Rosenthal, 1968).

Book critic and essayist Sven Birkerts thinks that the United States is passing through a period of overlapping communications modes similar to what took place in the Ancient Mideast and Classical world. "In Greece the basic shift from oral to literate culture was a slow process; for centuries, despite the existence of writing, Greece remained essentially an oral culture...which depended heavily on the encoding of information in poetic texts, to be learned by rote.... It was not until the age of Plato in the fourth century that the dominance of poetry in an oral culture was challenged in the final triumph of literacy. That challenge came in the form of philosophy, among other things, and poetry has never recovered its cultural primacy. What oral poetry was for the Greeks, printed books in general are for us." Birkerts calls our current communications stage, "proto-electronic," and predicts the transition will take only 50 years and not two centuries as in Greece (Birkerts, 1994, p. 121).

The papyrus technology, which I had only associated with Egypt, was apparently so pervasive that the Greek "biblos," Latin "liber," German "buch," and English "book," all derived from descriptions of fibrous plants. By the 5th century, scrolls of papyrus were being replaced by papyrus sheets that were accordion folded and eventually bound on one end, or by sheets of parchment (treated animal skin) stitched along one side. The term "codex" has come to represent this medium (Escarpit, p. 19). For the next 1000 years, European "books" were manuscripts produced in Latin by religious copyists.

During the same period, paper (made from the lining of Mulberry bark and later rags) was developed in China. This technology reached Europe during the Crusades, but writers were concerned that this new medium was not as durable as parchment and eschewed it. However, there was a growing demand for learning and literature among the middle and upper classes and, thus, a greater demand for books. When Gutenberg combined the elements of paper and movable type in 1454, he gave the people what they wanted. Book historian John Feather explained that "the printing press was an agent of change because it was able to play an important role in the society in which it was invented and from whose needs it had been developed." It was a response to social, economic and political demand (Feather, 1986, pp. 5-6). Although only a small portion of the population could read) this is the subject of debate, and some book historians think more "computer" analysis is needed), it is estimated that by the year 1500,1,000 print shops were established in Europe, and possibly 20 million volumes of "incunabula" were published (Escarpit, p. 21).

As more and more people became literate, an increasing amount of information was published about all areas of human endeavor. Birkerts opines that until the mid-1700s, people read the same material over and over again, usually out loud. People read "intensively." Later, people began reading more pamphlets and newspapers, material they only read once before racing to the next item. They were now, he states, reading "extensively" (Birkerts, p. 71). Even if his argument can't be proven, technical innovations in papermaking and mechanical printing around 1800 made extensive reading possible.

It is now argued by many in the fields of communication, literature and information science, that the rise of the electronic age and computer technology will put an end to the use of books in our lifetime. They predict, or warn, that the pervasiveness of computers and telecommunications will change the character of society and how it relates to information; that modifications in our way of reading impinge upon our mental life. How we receive information, they state, bears vitally on the ways we experience and interpret reality.

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The late Marshall McLuhan argued that each major period in human history took its character from the medium of communication most widely used at the time. In the age of print (1700-1950), the prevailing medium encouraged individualism, nationalism, democracy, the desire for privacy, specialization in work, and the separation of work and leisure. He predicted in the electronic age that the electronic media would produce a "global village," which would end individualism and nationalism and promote the growth of new international communities. Electronics, he felt, created the need for general, rather than specialized knowledge.

Birkerts agrees with the now much discredited McLuhan that we are in the midst of an epoch-making transition. He states that the societal shift from printbased to electronic communications is as consequential for our culture as was the shift instigated by Gutenberg's use of movable type. He is concerned because in our culture it is proliferation of material, not access, that is the problem. He laments that especially among our younger population individuals know countless bits of information without a stable sense of context. By getting the majority of our information from the electronic media and not from books, we are displacing "vertical" knowledge with "horizontal" knowledge; we are sacrificing depth to get lateral range. "The more complex and sophisticated our systems of lateral access, the more we sacrifice in the way of depth" (Birkerts, pp,. 26,192, 72, 26).

Telecommunication proponent George P. Landow agrees with Birkerts' observations and claims that the "movement from the tactile to the digital is the primary fact about the contemporary world." According to Landow, "Electronic text processing marks the next major shift in information technology after the development of the printed book. It promises (or threatens) to produce effects on our culture, particularly on our literature, education, criticism and scholarship, just as radical as those produced by Gutenberg's movable type" (Coover, 1992, p. 23).

Novelist Robert Coover recently taught several college courses in "Hypertext Fiction," devoted "as much to the changing of reading habits as to the creation of new narratives." In hypertext, which allows participants to move from section to section and alter text to suit their desires, reader and writer become co-learners and co-writers while they remap the textual (and sometimes visual and aural) components. Coover explains that in the "humming digitalized precincts of avant-garde computer hackers, cyberpunks and hyperspace freaks, you will often hear it said that the print medium is a doomed and outdated technology, a mere curiosity of bygone days destined soon to be consigned forever to those dusty unattended museums we now call libraries:" (Coover, p. 1).

Birkerts' jeremiad also discusses what he found out about his college literature students. Because they had always occupied themselves with music, TV and videos, they had difficulty slowing down enough to concentrate on .prose of any density, as well as difficulty with allusions, irony, vocabulary and any deviations from straight plot. He is very concerned that this college educated stratum is turned off by the great literature found in books. He writes, "...Our entire collective subjective history, the soul of our societal body, is encoded in print. Is encoded, and for countless generations has been passed along by way of the word, mainly through books...." It is in effect, "...the cumulative speculations of the species. If a person turns from print, finding it too slow, too hard, irrelevant to the excitements of the present, then what happens to that person's sense of culture and continuity?" Continuing his dramatic rhetoric, he states that our sudden transition into an electronic culture has "thrust us into a place of unknowing. We have been stripped not only of familiar habits and ways, but of familiar points of moral and psychological reference" (Birkerts, pp. 19-21).

Historian-turned-librarian Daniel Boorstin addressed the issue of preventing the loss of accumulated knowledge a decade earlier. In his 1979 remarks at the White House Conference on Libraries he alluded to the economic principal that things with valuable content are hoarded away while things of less value are circulated freely and become the dominant specie. He contended that books dealt with knowledge and were an orderly and cumulative medium. Broadcasting (telecommunications), on the other hand, dealt in information that is random and miscellaneous. Based on Gresham's Law, information tends to drive knowledge out of circulation. He states, "The latest information on anything and everything is collected, diffused, received, stored and retrieved before anyone can discover whether the facts have meaning" (Boorstin, 1979, p. 3).

Boorstin believed that "knowledge institutions" (libraries) shouldn't just be concerned with the storage and retrieval of information, but rather with "the enduring treasure of our whole human past." He asked information service providers to "focus your attention on the distinction between knowledge and information, the importance of the distinction, and the dangers of failing to recognize it" (Boorstin, 1979, pp. 1-2).

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Unlike traditional publishing, computer technology focuses on the process more than the product. Telecommunications encourage the user to have a heightened and ever-changing awareness of the present. In the electronic order, the learning process is laterally associative rather than vertically cumulative, and this works against the users developing the historical perception that they can gain from books (Birkerts, pp. 122-123)

So, should librarians "first—kill all the computers?" No, obviously for some purposes, computers can provide services superior to those of the traditional book. For example, where data changes frequently and where speedy, multiple or remote access is essential, computers are well suited. Additionally, they are becoming very good for some forms of interactive learning. Because of their word processing and formatting abilities, computers have enhanced book publishing and have allowed new businesses to be created. In the future, computers will allow wide-spread, nondestructive access to rare or fragile visual or print collections. Also, the concept of "print-on-demand" systems is being explored. This would allow titles of marginal or limited interest to be digitized and held until someone wanted a printed copy. This could mean that "books" would never go "out-of-print."

There are a number of reasons why the Book will "not go gently into that good night." McLuhan contended that it was the media and not the message that actually influenced people. But Theodore Roszak pointed out the paradox of McLuhan using the printed page to inform his reader that the content of the printed page had no influence over them (Presented in Rosenthal, 1968, p. 263).

There is a permanence to the written page that is missing from digital communication. This is especially true in religion. The ancient Egyptians identified writing as "the speech of the gods." Examples of the weight and authority given to the written versus the spoken word are numerous. Pharaohs were alleged to have said, "So it is written, so it shall be." Moses continued the Semitic tradition of putting legal and spiritual codes in print by having the 513 laws he got from God written into the Torah. According to Innis, "The written letter replaced the graven image as an object of worship." Commentary in the Talmud warns that "the omission or addition of one letter might mean the destruction of the whole world" (Innis, p. 44). Jews, Christians and Moslems are referred to in Western culture as "people of the book." It would seem then that as long as these and other traditional religions exist, so to will the Book exist.

It has been pointed out that circuit and screen are good for some things, but not for subjective materials of depth of knowledge. Therefore, books are needed in the study of history because the books are history themselves. For example, in 19671 had to analyze The Strange Career of Jim Crow in an undergraduate history class. In 1992, my daughter selected the same book to write about. It was interesting to trace the differences in each of the four editions of C. Vann Woodward's work as they were written at different times in the course of the civil rights movement.

A third and very subjective reason why the book won't die is ergonomics. The long-term prolonged use of using a computer screen is yet to be fully studied and documented. However, I have a great deal of trouble sitting and reading anything that is complex. I also tend to skim through and bounce around in the medium. If I try to perform my speed reading skills I get nauseous. In a totally unscientific survey, I have found that no one I know who likes to read wants to cuddle up in bed to read a story on their computer. As long as there are people who like to read good fiction, there will always be portable books. This leads us to our next question, will there continue to be readers of somewhat complex history and literature?

If we are convinced that there is an important role for the book in our society, what should librarians and information service providers do to guarantee its existence? In 1984, Boorstin warned that there were two main literacy problems that could harm the future of America; illiteracy and aliteracy. A Nation at Risk pointed out that there were 23 million functional illiterate adults in the United States. Boorstin hoped that with the support of public libraries, illiteracy would be gone before the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1989. Despite libraries being used as the setting for programs like Project Read, illiteracy continues to be a problem.

Aliteracy is the lack of will or interest to read. Although there are not more books being published, sold through more outlets than every before, only half of all Americans read some books each year. To help combat aliteracy, Boorstin stated that librarians should realize that reading motivation begins at home. Programs to address aliteracy should be geared to both children and their parents.

In the early 1980s, the Decatur Public Library supported a grant proposal to create and fund Project Baby Talk. This program sent staff into every newborn's hospital room in the city. Program workers gave each parent lavishly illustrated reading lists, developmental reading techniques and a free book. Follow-up invitations to lap-sit reading sessions at the

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library were sent several months later. This program has become the prototype for dozens across the country that have used Decatur as their reference resource.

At the federal level. Reading is Fundamental was started in 1966 when it was found that not all households in America could afford books. RIF has since given away more than 10 million paperbacks to elementary and junior high school students. However, I have not seen any studies that evaluate whether the program has had any significant affect in the promotion of individual reading habits.

It seems to me that libraians should continue to do what many of them have been doing for years, helping their patrons to find worthwhile and appropriate materials without being judgmental about the subject matter. Summer reading programs, which are now usually done in cooperation with businesses, should be continued for children. Librarians should continue to sponsor book groups and special interest groups such as investors or Civil War buffs. Librarians, if asked, should serve as reader advisors and should continue to prepare and post book lists. To me, the canon would be any list of books that is appropriate for the patron's interests, goals and abilities. In promoting books, Daniel Boorstin concludes that instead of an "informed citizenry," we need a "knowledgeable citizenry." "The autonomous reader, amusing and knowledging himself, is the be-all and end-all of our libraries" (Boorstin, 1979, p. 5).

In conclusion, the book is alive and well but has temporarily lost some of its status to telecommunications and digitized formats. Librarians must be careful not to ignore the strengths of their collection in favor of possible electronic wizardry. Electronic preservationist Janice Mohlhenrich thinks that we should work for hybrid technologies that combine hard copies and online data. She states, "Let us hope for leadership that embraces the best of new technology while maintaining perspective on the long-range needs of library patrons of the future" (Mohlhenrich, 1993), pp. 119-120). Ten years before the World Wide Web became the subject of hundreds of popular press articles, educator Ernest Boyer told the library community, "Television extends human sight, computers extend memory and ability for calculation. Books extend wisdom. It is now our task to fit together these tools, the new ones with the old" (Quoted in Boorstin, 1984, p. 26).

In my lifetime I don't expect to see the "Book as Thing," or the "Book as Idea" expire. At least not while a portion of the electronic crowd agrees with Mohlhenrich's belief that, "It is truly a privilege to experience holding in one's hands a book dated 1550 or 1650...to turn the pages, read the words, and marvel at the transfer of information from mind to mind, bridging the centuries without the need of any other devices to allow understanding" (Mohlhenrich, p. 120).

Even the overwrought Sven Birkerts, who sees digitization as producing a "crisis of meaning" in the human soul, has some hope for mankind's salvation through the revelations of literature contained in traditional books. Eventually, people will turn away from the cyber-satan, "the book will be seen as a haven, as a way of going off-line and into a space sanctified by subjectivity. So long as there is a natural inclination toward independent selfhood, so long will literature be able to prove the reports of its death exaggerated" (Birkerts, p. 197).

Sources

The following items were used in the preparation of this paper. Birkerts' The Gutenbeg Elegies, and those works ascribed to Daniel Boorstin influenced my thinking the most.

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutneberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994. Boorstin, Daniel. Boote In Our Future: A Report From the Librarian of Congress to the Congress. Washington: Joint Committee on the Library, 1984.

__. Gresham's Law: Knowledge or Information. Washington: Library of Congress, Center for the Book, 1979. Coover, Robert. "The End of Books/' New York Times Book Review. June 21,1992. (Section 7, pp 1,19-21).

Escarpit, Robert. The Book Revolution. London: George G. Hanrap & Co. Ltd., 1966.

Feather, John P. "The Book in History and the History of the Book," in The History of Books and Libraries: Two Views by Father, John P. and McKitterick, David. Washington: Library of Congress, 1986. Harley, E.S. and Hampden, John. Books: From Papyrus to Paperback. London: Methuen & Co. Std, 1964.

Innis, Harold A. Empire and Communications. (Originally published in 1950, it was revised by the author's wife, Mary Q. Innis with a Foreword by Marshall McLuhan) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972.

Mohlhenrich, Janice, Editor. Preservation of Electronic Formats & Electronic Formats for Preservation. Fort Atkinson, WI: Highsmith Press, 1993.

Rosenthal, Raymond, Editor. McLuhan: Pro & Con. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968.

Roszak, Theodore. The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

*Mark W. Sorensen, Assistant Director, Illinois State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Springfield. Mr. Sorensen is also a graduate library school student at the University of Illinois in Urbana.

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