This help desk episode has been very “viral”: it reminds me of a good article on the future of the book, “The Book is Dead, Long live the Book“, from Priscilla Murphy. People have predicted the demise of the book for a very long time. In 1894, one writer predicted that the phonograph and the kinetograph would rapidly substitute paper-based text with audio.
Murphy explores and questions three themes,
- rivalry between media, that they are competing for limited public attention, so every dollar spent on new media = a dollar taken away from books;
- convergence, where the new medium affects the old, so that they combine, but cultural attitudes change more slowly than technology; and
- complementarity, where each media may complement the others, even synergistically.
“Books are, finally, intricately interrelated to the rest of the media system – economically, socially, intellectually, even symbolically; and those who have envisioned or feared their wholesale removal from the system have generally underestimated that involvement. If one would predict the death of books, it is necessary to know how they live (Murphy).”