From the LA Review of Books by Ben Ehrenreich (author and journalist):
“Kindle…or kindling”.
Pity the book. It’s dead again. Last I checked, Googling “death of the book” produced 11.8 million matches. The day before it was 11.6 milion. It’s getting unseemly. Books were once such handsome things. Suddenly they seem clunky, heavy, almost fleshy in their gross materiality. Their pages grow brittle. Their ink fades. Their spines collapse. They are so pitiful, they might as well be human.
The emphasis shifts with each telling, but every writer, editor, publisher, bookseller, and half-attentive reader knows the fundamental story. After centuries of steady climbing, book sales leveled off towards the end of the 1900s. Basic literacy began to plummet. As if television and Reaganomics were not danger enough, some egghead lunatics went and built a web—a web!—out of nothing but electrons. It proved a sneaky and seductive monster. Straight to our offices and living rooms, the web delivered chicken recipes, weather forecasts, pornography, the cutest kitten videos the world had ever seen. But while we were distracted by these glittering gifts, the internet conspired to snare our friend the book, to smother it.
“Save the Book!”, I proclaim, considering which ereader to buy
Times change. Our definition of what a book is has changed over the centuries. It is doing so again. It is the content most people are interested in, not the package.
Books are works of art, indeed. Or they can be. Let’s not kid ourselves here: the latest hardback of Nora Roberts is NOT an illuminated manuscript. It’s a mass-produced object with one intent: selling the contents.
So start scrapbooking. Learn how to make books yourself to make true works of art. Someday books may be as obscure as the rolls are now that once populated the library at Alexandria, but clinging on to them because we cannot accept they are decreasing in popularity is just stubborn and silly. I would much rather have a population of citizens who can read more (what they want when they want it) rather than people who read less having to wait for librarians to populate our shelves full of paper copies people want less and less.
– Keyth Sokol, Lexington, KY (and yes, I am a librarian)
Change the terminology!
Why should the discussion be on the ‘death’ of the book? Why can it not change into the EVOLUTION of the book? Just as many life forms change and fade, many technologies have arisen and been superceded as books have changed.