"The book is dead"
(Marshall McLuhan)
Marshall McLuhan's statement that "the
book is dead" is often repeated by cultural pessimists. Many
intellectuals are concerned that the book is threatened by television
(particularly after the invention of the videorecorder) and by
what is commonly called the "new media", that is the
internet and CD-ROM's. Indeed, at first glance Mr. Mc Luhan does
seem to have a point. On a CD-ROM there is space for hundreds
of books and the internet even offers nearly unlimited capacity
to store data previously written down in books.
But the emphasis of these media is often not on information but
on entertainment, thus creating the category "infotainment",
information which is presented in a entertaining way. This development
may be questionable, but is it a threat to the book?
A way to answer this question is to ask another
one: do people read less today?
And here the first setback for the pessimists occurs: research
shows that people do not read less but more than, say, thirty
years ago. Why is that so? Contrary to popular belief, the level
of education is not declining but has been constantly increasing
throughout the twentieth century. Additionally, people have more
free time to spare. These factors contribute to the fact that
the book is today more popular than ever. However, the data available
to me does not clarify the question what kind of literature people
nowadays devour. Many of the books read by the masses are probably
light entertainment and do not ponder great philosophical questions.
This, though, is not a new phenomenon. Popular literature, often
more bluntly referred to as "junk", has existed ever
since the invention of printing by Gutenberg. The view that fifty
years ago people read better books is a myth.
TV is often made responsible for the supposed
decline of the book. It is indeed a fact that people use a large
proportion of their free time for watching "the telly".
But, in sum, the enormous increase in free time has had the result
that more people read more books than ever before.
A new medium is often regarded with suspicion. "Writing
is bad for the memory", the Old Greeks said. "Printing
will make the quality of handwriting suffer", scholars in
the fifteenth century stated . At the beginning of our century,
a child which spent much time reading was disapproved of. Later,
with the advent of television, concerned parents told children
to read more. When personal computers began to appear, parents
scolded their children for spending too much time playing "these
silly computer games". Now, many families have access to
the internet and parents are probably advising their offspring
to keep the hands off the net and play some of the good old video
games.
"Everything changes, everything is in flux" Francis
Urquhart says in "To play the King". And people fear
change. Thus, they tend to stick with conservative media, and
what could be more conservative than a book (although many revolutionary
thoughts have been spread through it). Written texts are, after
all, the oldest medium and one of the most outstanding inventions
of humankind. This fear of change is also one of the underlying
factors why many, even learned people, postulate a threat to the
book.
While they are unlikely to destroy the book, new media may very well cause a change in the way we use books. For example, we may already look up phone numbers on the internet. It is much more convenient to type in the name of a person whose number you want than to leaf through the thousands of pages of a conventional phone book. Additionally, the on-line phone "book" is updated every twenty four hours. Thus, it is likely that phone books - and similar items like library catalogues - will not be printed anymore in the not so distant future. And that would not really be a terrible loss; it would certainly save a lot of wood.
Clearly, books will become less relevant for information which dates very easily. But when you hold a book in your hand there will always be certain feeling which you are unable to experience when consulting a CD-ROM or surfing the net. This feelings consists of the sensation one perceives when touching the leaves of a good book, the smell of paper, the sense of history and tradition and, last but not least, the immeasurable joy a good book can bring.
However, there are great changes going on in
the publishing business. Companies merge with each other and big
multimedia corporations are born. There is some danger in that
development, namely, that only books that sell are published and
republished. "Out of print" Amazon. com , perhaps "the
biggest bookshop in the world" but certainly the biggest
bookstore on the web, often tells me when I query it for a rather
unusual author or book. And those unusual books that are available
are expensive.
In Austria, the biggest change to come will be the fall of the
so-called "Ladenpreisbindung", the agreement that bookshops
may sell a book only for a fixed price and not below it. If
the dissolution of that agreement, which does not correspond to
E.U. guidelines, is a bad thing or not remains to be seen. On
the one hand, booksellers call it a disaster but, on the other
hand, other countries, Great Britain for instance, have managed
quite well without.
To sum up, we could say that McLuhan was definitely wrong. The
book is not dead, it is not even on the list of endangered species.
Printed texts in the form of books are going to be with us for
a long time to come. In the future there will be a growing co-operation
between different media. Even today, an initiative called "The
Gutenberg project" scans books and puts them on the net.
This may be a headache for publishing companies, but millions
- if not billions - of users thus gain accesss to the wealth of
our common human heritage.
(1016 words)