A Companion to the History of the Book (96 page)

Just at the time when librarianship transformed itself into an “information profession” focused on technologies, however, scholars in the humanities (and some “softer” social sciences) began to question the historical traditions surrounding cultural definitions of “best reading.” Where previously humanities scholars had concentrated mostly on “culture as text,” they now began to explore questions addressing “culture as agency” and “culture as practice.” Although elements of “culture as text” remained in the practice of librarianship (for example, rare books and children’s librarianship), the profession manifested little interest in or knowledge of culture as agency or culture as practice – an approach that would have repositioned the physical book as an essential element in library service. And largely because the profession’s perspective had been “user in the life of the library” rather than “library in the life of the user,” library and information studies discourse in the last quarter of the twentieth century focused hardly at all on information content, but almost entirely on information access made possible by new technologies.

In I967, for example, the Ohio College Association founded the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC). For the first four years, the Center developed a systems architecture, and provided catalogue card production services. In 1971, it began online operation with its Cataloguing Subsystem. Because OCLC had also adopted MARC records (a standard format for machine-readable bibliographic records developed by the Library of Congress) on which many libraries depended, by 2000 thousands of libraries around the world were using its database for cooperative cataloguing and author/title verification.

Meanwhile, the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency established a computer network. When the federal government sponsored a program to establish communication protocols to integrate multiple networks, the Internet was born. By the turn of the century, thousands of libraries of all types had also developed online public access catalogues accessible through the Internet, adopted packaged automated circulation systems, and incorporated the use of CD-ROM products and Internet-accessible databases into the provision of traditional library services. Among billions of other library users, students and scholars of book history have benefited substantially from the searching capacities that these systems provide. Libraries and their information technologies deserve much credit for the quality and quantity of recent book history research (print and electronic).

In the past decade, a small group of library historians have begun analyzing culture as agency and practice from a “library in the life of the user” perspective, and thus located the historical study of libraries and librarianship in the broader context of book history. For example, in a 1998
American Quarterly
article entitled “The Business of Reading in Nineteenth-century America,” Thomas Augst demonstrated how users of the New York Mercantile Library commodified their reading into categorizations like “useful knowledge” and “rational amusements,” and how the library’s middle-class, male patrons then used the act of reading as an agent to demonstrate their “character.” In the process of adapting to these interests, library managers articulated a new rationale for understanding these new dynamics for reading to justify it as a civic enterprise worthy of private and public support.

Other studies took similar approaches, including Abigail Van Slyck’s
Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890–1920
(1995), Alistair Black’s
The Public Library in Britain, 1914–2000
(2000), and, in part, my own
Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey
(1996). Perhaps the best example of this kind of scholarship is Christine Pawley’s
Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late Nineteenth-century Osage, Iowa
(2001), which harnesses census and extant library circulation records to identify who read what from the collections of a small town library in northern Iowa between 1890 and 1895. From her research, Pawley constructed a reading profile for an entire community, and located the multiple roles the public library played in facilitating its individual and collective reading experiences.

Over the past century and a half, the priorities of librarianship have been reflected in the ALA motto: “the best reading for the greatest number at the least cost.” During that time, libraries worldwide have done three things very well: (1) made information on many subjects accessible to billions of people; (2) provided tens of thousands of places where patrons have been able to meet formally, as clubs or groups, or informally as citizens and students utilizing a civic institution and a cultural agency; and (3) furnished billions of reading materials to billions of patrons. In the past half-century, library statistics on book circulation and visits around the globe demonstrate mostly steady growth. For students and scholars of book history, libraries have always been valuable research sites. Today, library historians are harnessing theoretical constructs that deepen our understanding of the multiple roles these ubiquitous institutions have played in their host communities over many generations.

References and Further Reading

Augst, Thomas (1998) “The Business of Reading in Nineteenth-century America: The New York Mercantile Library.”
American Quarterly,
50: 267–305.

Battle, Matthew (2003)
Library: An Unquiet History.
New York: Norton.

Bell, Daniel (1973)
The Coming of the Post-industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting.
New York: Basic.

Black, Alistair (1996)
A New History of the English Public Library: Social and Intellectual Contexts, 1850–1914.
London: Leicester University Press.

— (2000)
The Public Library in Britain, 1914–2000.
London: British Library.

Casson, Lionel (2001)
Libraries in the Ancient World.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

Christ, Karl (1984)
The Handbook of Medieval Library History.
Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow.

Cole, John Y. and Aikin, Jane (eds.) (2005)
Encyclopedia of the Library of Congress: For Congress, the Nation, and the World.
Lanham: Bernan.

“Fiction Song” (1890)
Library Journal,
15: 325.

Fyfe, Janet (1992)
Book Behind Bars: The Role of Books, Reading, and Libraries in British Prison Reform, 1701–1911.
Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Garrison, Dee (2003)
Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876–1920,
2nd edn. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Gilmore, William J. (1989)
Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Harris, Michael H. (1995)
History of Libraries in the Western World.
Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow.

Harris, P. R. (ed.) (1991)
The Library of the British Museum.
London: British Library.

Knuth, Rebecca (2003)
Libricide: The Regime-sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century.
Westport, CT: Praeger.

Lancaster, F. Wilfrid (1978)
Toward Paperless Information Systems.
New York: Academic.

Lerner, Fred (1998)
The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer.
New York: Continuum.

McHenry, Elizabeth (2002)
Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies.
Durham: Duke University Press.

MacLeod, Roy (ed.) (2000)
The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World.
London: I. B. Tauris.

McLuhan, Marshall (1962)
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

— (1964)
Understanding Media: The Extension of Man.
New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marshall, D. N. (1983)
History of Libraries: Ancient and Medieval.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Pawley, Christine (2001)
Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late Nineteenth-century Osage, Iowa.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Robbins, Louise (2000)
The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Rose, Jonathan (ed.) (2001)
The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Rubin, Richard (2004)
Foundations of Library and Information Science.
New York: Neal-Schuman.

Sherman, William H. (1995)
John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Staikos, Konstantinos Sp. (2000)
The Great Libraries: From Antiquity to the Renaissance,
trans. Timothy Cullen. New Castle: Oak Knoll.

Stam, David H. (ed.) (2001)
International Dictionary of Library Histories.
Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Thompson, James (1977)
A History of the Principles of Librarianship.
Hamden: Linnet.

Toffler, Alvin (1970)
Future Shock.
New York: Random House.

— (1980)
The Third Wave.
New York: William Morrow.

Van Slyck, Abigail (1995)
Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890–1920.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wiegand, Wayne A. (1996)
Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey.
Chicago: American Library Association.

— and Davis, Donald G., Jr. (eds.) (1994)
Encyclopedia of Library History.
New York: Garland.

Coda

40

Does the Book Have a Future?

Angus Phillips

Old media don’t die; they just have to grow old gracefully.

(Douglas Adams,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Future)

From the beginnings of the digital revolution, commentators have examined the prospects for the book and wondered whether it can survive alongside new technologies. In an age when text can be accessed all over the world through a variety of devices, and when the book competes with many other forms of entertainment, does it seem a dated and outmoded technology or a reliable and robust companion? What sort of future can we see for the book?

If the book has had its day, what would be the test? When readers are avid followers of fiction on their mobile phones? When children study using laptops and are leaving behind the use of print resources? When less than half of all adults in the world’s largest economy read literature? When a successful publisher sells off its print program to concentrate on electronic resources and services? When dictionary users consult electronic pens for a definition or a translation?

This is the world now, and if some of these trends continue, the future of the book in its traditional sense is certainly under question. Yet if we apply other tests – for example, the number of books published each year or the success of individual writers such as J. K. Rowling – the book remains resilient in the face of changes in technology, culture, and society. Paradoxically, the world going digital is helping to keep the book alive, with the possibility that books may remain in print indefinitely while being available to buy anywhere in the world.

The Digital Revolution

Industries are going through major upheavals as a result of the “digital revolution.” This can be defined as: “The effects of the rapid drop in cost and rapid expansion of power of digital devices such as computers and telecommunications. It includes changes in technology and society, and is often specifically used to refer to the controversies that occur as these technologies are widely adopted”
(Wikipedia,
accessed May 3, 2005). Two examples of industries that have been affected are photography and music. The switch from film to digital photography has impacted on the processing industry, the manufacture and sales of traditional film cameras, and the way in which people share and store their holiday snaps and family memories. What began as a switch from film to digital cameras has taken another turn with the development of high-resolution camera phones.

The music industry transferred from analog to digital (Negroponte 1995), with compact discs (CDs) replacing vinyl records. Subsequently, the resistance to music downloads and file sharing has broken down, and the music charts now take account of downloaded music. Most artists openly support the changes. The concept of owning music is under question; for some consumers, it may be enough to listen on demand without having a personal copy of a particular track. “With ubiquitous broadband, both wired and wireless, more consumers will turn to the celestial jukebox of music services that offer every track ever made, playable on demand” (Anderson 2004).

If we turn to book production, the
process
of publishing books has gone thoroughly digital – from the delivery of text from authors on disk or by e-mail through to page design on computer and the electronic delivery of files to the printer. The concept of “create once/publish many” has led to print being only one of the formats employed by publishers, alongside Web delivery and CD-ROMs. Educational, reference, and professional publishing have adopted electronic publishing as a central part of their activities.

In scholarly publishing, online access is the dominant mode of delivery for many journals. There is also a trend toward digital publication of academic monographs. Oxford Scholarship Online, launched in 2003, is a service for delivering monographs to libraries, using titles published by Oxford University Press. With search facilities and cross-referencing, the service replicates “the kind of system that academics already use in the online environment of scholarly journals” (Thompson 2005: 363). Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, predicts that by the year 2020, 40 percent of UK research monographs will be available in electronic format only, while a further 50 percent will be produced in both print and digital formats (British Library 2005). This development will require a major cultural shift in academic communities, as print publication (with peer review) for book-length works is still a requirement for career advancement in many disciplines.

Educational publishing in many parts of the world is moving further toward the development of electronic resources. In the United Kingdom, the government has directed monies toward e-learning resources and high-speed broadband connections in schools. In China, there is government support for educational resources with online delivery, especially for the teaching of English. The CD-ROM was once seen as a universal means of electronic delivery for educational and reference material, and in the early 1990s publishers invested heavily in multimedia versions of print products. With poor sales and the rapid expansion of the Web, investment soon switched to online developments. As home users increasingly adopt broadband, there are renewed opportunities for publishers to produce multimedia content and reduce emphasis on print.

A decade ago, the novelist E. Annie Proulx said that the information highway was meant for “bulletin boards on esoteric subjects, reference works, lists and news – timely, utilitarian information, efficiently pulled through the wires. Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever”
(New York Times,
May 26, 1994). Today, e-books of novels are certainly available to read on computers and handheld devices, and versions of classic novels can be downloaded for free. There are people who read novels on handhelds, but the numbers remain tiny in comparison with traditional print readers. Could this position change? If the iPod and other music players have revolutionized the way in which people engage with music, could an equivalent highly portable device work for print? Could there be added value in e-books, in a similar manner to the extra features found on DVDs? Will readers browse texts using a randomizing facility? Audio book companies are already seeing the potential for downloads of their products, replacing tapes and CDs.

The Japanese book industry is mature, with negative sales growth over a number of years, and commentators view the market as saturated. Madoka Hanajiri sees that “Customers’ behaviour has been and is continuing to change. More than twenty years ago, it was cool and fashionable for college students to carry around philosophy books even if they didn’t actually read them. Now college students pay more attention to their mobile phones” (Hanajiri 2003: 55). As elsewhere in the world, phones are being used for e-mail, surfing the Web, games, and photography; e-book sales are growing fast, and new titles are being written for readers on mobile phones. One reader commented: “My eyes sometimes get tired but I like the idea of being able to read on trains when they are so packed there isn’t even space to open a book … I also like dipping in and out of books, rather than always reading straight narratives” (McCurry 2005). The author Yoshi wrote
Deep Love
(2002), the story of a 17-year-old girl who finds romance, in installments for reading on mobile phones:

Instalments of the novel started receiving millions of hits, mainly from teenage girls, many of whom wouldn’t touch an ordinary book . . . Unlike authors of traditional novels, Yoshi knows immediately when his readers are getting bored: they either stop visiting his site or e-mail him directly. Because he writes in instalments, he can meddle with the storyline at any time. (McCurry 2005)

Dedicated electronic devices – e-book readers specifically designed to store and display books with the clarity of the printed page – have not yet achieved a mass sale. In 2006, Sony launched a new lightweight reader with a memory that could support up to eighty titles. Echoing the development of Apple’s iTunes music store, agreements were reached with major publishers to sell digital books via an online store. Victoria Barnsley, Chief Executive of HarperCollins UK, commented: “Whether it is the Sony Reader that proves successful or the next generation of reading devices, this could be a big market and provide opportunities for publishers” (Andrews 2006). Meanwhile, work has been progressing on the development of electronic paper. Just as vinyl records, CDs, videos, and DVDs can all disappear into a hard disk in your living room, so could your library of books. When you want to read your chosen title, you would be able to download and display it within a book-like object with flexible pages similar to paper. The book would be highly portable and you could take several titles on holiday with you using a small memory device. Using wireless technology, you could stream in whatever title you chose. The costs of electronic paper remain too high for mass production, but development work continues.

The linking of mobile and GPS (global positioning system) technologies offers further opportunities; for example, to revolutionize travel publishing. Although guidebooks are available as e-books, they are not yet linked to the user’s location, offering local cultural or restaurant tips. There is the potential to offer a range of novels or travel literature suitable to the reader’s destination: for example, the tourist in Paris could have a downloadable copy of Victor Hugo’s
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,
Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises,
or Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code
with the relevant text highlighted.

Society and Culture

The book competes with a variety of other entertainments, and the current younger generation is accustomed to alternative ways of acquiring information. The newspaper industry has had to adapt to competition from television and the Web. In 2004,
The Times
of London went tabloid. The editor, Robert Thomson, quoted the Web as an influence on the paper’s new design: “The traditional broadsheet involves what you might call scanning skills, but for an increasing number of people, especially young people who are used to internet presentation, they have developed scrolling skills. Interestingly enough, those scrolling skills work a lot better in the compact format than they do in a broadsheet” (Greenslade 2004).

The primacy of print is under question, undermined by the ease of access to the Internet and a new generation brought up without the same unequivocal respect for the book. For many, Google is the first port of call in the search for facts, replacing the reference shelf by the desk. Schoolchildren are encouraged by their teachers to surf for background information for their homework rather than use an encyclopedia. Universities struggle to teach the virtues of citing sources correctly, but students see little wrong in adapting or copying the words of others. In pilot projects in schools in the UK and the US, schoolchildren are being given laptops or PDAs to use at home and school, replacing the heavy rucksack of schoolbooks. Interactive whiteboards are changing the style of teaching and offer opportunities for new classroom activities.

For adults, reading for pleasure has to be fitted into busy lifestyles. Reasons for not reading books (given by non-readers in the UK) include: preferring newspapers or magazines; having insufficient time; preferring a more relaxing activity; not enjoying reading (Bury 2005: 13). In Ian McEwan’s novel
Saturday,
Henry Perowne, a busy and highly intelligent neurosurgeon, persists with fiction recommended by his daughter, but remains cautious of this other world:

Henry never imagined he would end up living in the sort of house that had a library. It’s an ambition of his to spend whole weekends in there, stretched out on one of the Knole sofas, pot of coffee at his side, reading some world-rank masterpiece or other, perhaps in translation . . . But his free time is always fragmented, not only by errands and family obligations and sports, but by the restlessness that comes with these weekly islands of freedom. He doesn’t want to spend his days off lying, or even sitting, down. (McEwan 2005:
66
)

We could never catch up with our reading in any case. The Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid, in his playful treatise on reading,
So Many Books,
points out that a new book is published every thirty seconds: “Books are published at such a rapid rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant. If a person read a book every day, he would be neglecting to read four thousand others, published the same day” (Zaid 2003: 22).

In the UK, around half of all leisure time is spent watching television (National Statistics 2005: 174). Only one in five adults is classified as a heavy book-buyer, while a third of adults surveyed had not bought a single book in the past year. “Broadly speaking, the richer and more educated a person, the more books they buy” (Bury 2005: 4), yet growth in the UK economy and a higher proportion of the population entering higher education have not led to a boom in the sale of books. Between 1993 and 2003, the number of books borrowed from UK libraries declined by 36 percent and the active lending stock fell by 17 percent (LISU 2004: 19). Yet the use of audiovisual and electronic media in libraries grew over this period.

In the United States, considerable concern was created by the appearance of the National Endowment for the Arts report on
Reading at Risk
(2004). Between 1982 and 2002, the proportion of the US adult population reading literature (novels, short stories, plays, and poetry) fell by 10 percentage points, from 56.9 percent to 46.7 percent. The proportion reading any kind of book fell by 7 percentage points. In 2002, while 55 percent of women read literature, the figure for men was only 37.6 percent. In the preface, Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote:

This comprehensive survey of American literary reading presents a detailed but bleak assessment of the decline of reading’s role in the nation’s culture. For the first time in modern history, less than half of the adult population now reads literature . . .
Reading at Risk
merely documents and quantifies a huge cultural transformation that most Americans have already noted – our society’s massive shift towards electronic media for information and entertainment. (National Endowment for the Arts 2004: vii)