Carlyle believed that "The true university is a collection of
books." If books truly represent the spirit and letter of the
civilization of literacy, a description of their current
condition can be instructive. Obviously, one has to accept the
possibility that the civilization of literacy will continue in
some form, or in more than one, that will extend the experience
of the book, as we know it today through its physical form. Or
the civilization of literacy may continue in a totally new form
that responds to the human desire for efficiency. Addressing the
International Publishers Association Congress in June, 1988,
George Steiner tried to identify the "interlocking factors" that
led to the establishment of book culture. The technology of
printing, paper production, and advances in typography that are
associated with the "private ownership of space, of silence, and
of books themselves" are among factors affecting the process.
Another important factor is book aesthetics, the underlying
formal quality of a medium that had to compete with vivid
images, with powerful traditions of orality, and with patterns of
behavior established within practical experiences different from
those of book culture.
Near the end of the 15th century, Aldus Manutius understood that
the new technology of printing could be, and should be, more
than the mere continuation of the tradition of manuscripts. The
artifact of the book, close to what we know today, is mainly his
contribution to the civilization of literacy. Manutius applied
aesthetic and functional criteria that led to the smaller-sized
books we are familiar with. He worked with covers; the hard
cover in thicker cardboard replaced the covers of pinewood used
to protect manuscripts and early printed texts. The understanding
of aesthetics and of the experience of reading led him to define
better layouts and a new typography. His concern with
portability (a quality obsessing contemporary computer
designers), with readability (of no less interest to computer
display experts), and with a balanced visual appearance make him
the real saint of the order of the book.
The book also entails conventions of intellectual ownership. In
their effort to stop the dissemination of heretical books
through print, Philip and Mary, in 1557, limited the right of
printing to the members of the Stationers' Company. In 1585,
copyright for members was introduced; and in 1709, copyright for
authors. From that time on, the book expanded the notion of
property, different from the notion of ownership of land,
animals, and buildings, especially in view of the desire,
implicit in literacy, to literally spread the word. Now that
desktop capabilities and technologies that facilitate print on
demand affordably reproduce print, old notions of property and
ownership need to be redefined. Our understanding of books and
the people who read them, too, needs to be redefined as well.
Today, books can be stored on media other than sheets of paper,
on which words are printed and which are bound between hard or
soft covers. One hundred optical disks can store the entire
contents of the Library of Congress. This means, among other
things, that works of incredible significance cost five cents per
book printed digitally. Another result is that the notion of
intellectual ownership becomes fuzzy. Actually, the word book is
not the proper one to use in the case of digital storage. The
new pragmatics makes it crisply clear that the book is merely a
medium for the storage and transmission of data, knowledge, and
wisdom, as well as a lot of stupidity and vulgarity.
For people who prefer the book format, high-performance printing
presses are able to efficiently provide runs for very precisely
defined segments of the population just waiting for the Great
American Novel that is custom written and produced for one
reader at a time. "Personalized Story Books Starring Your Child,"
screams an advertisement. It promises "Hard cover, full color
illustration, exciting stories with positive image building
storylines." All that must be provided is the child's name, age,
city of residence, and the names of three friends or relatives.
The rest is permutation (and an order form). Grandma did a
better job with her photo and keepsake album, but the framework
of mediation replaced her long ago. Paper is available in all
imaginable quantities and qualities; the technologies of
typesetting, layout, image reproduction, and binding are all in
place.
Nowadays, there is enough private space. The wash of noise is not
a serious obstacle to people who want to read, even if they do
not wear noise cancellation headphones. And never were books
published at more affordable prices than today. Some books
reside on the shelves of the Internet or are integrated in
broader hyper- books on the World Wide Web. A word from one
book-let's say a new concept built upon earlier language
experiences-connects the interested reader to other books and
articles, as well as to voices that read texts, to songs, and to
images. The book is no longer a self-sufficient entity, but a
medium for possible interaction.
At the threshold of the civilization of illiteracy, how many
books are printed? In which medium? How many are sold? Are they
read? How? By whom? These are only some of the questions to be
posed when approaching the subject of books. Even more important
is the "Why?"-in particular, "Why read books?"-the real test of
the book's legitimacy, and ergo, the legitimacy of the
civilization which the book emblemizes. The broader issue is
actually reading and writing, or to be more precise, the means
through which an author can address many readers.
The fine balance of factors involved in the publishing and
success of a book is extremely difficult to describe. The
general trend in publishing can be described as more and more
titles in smaller and smaller editions. Ideally, a good
manuscript (of a novel, book of poetry, plays, essays,
scientific or philosophic writings) should become a successful
book, i.e., one that sells. In the reality of the book business,
many mediating elements determine the destiny of a manuscript.
Most of these elements are totally unrelated to the quality of
writing or to the satisfaction of reading. They reflect market
processes of valuation.
These elements are symptomatic of the book's condition in the
civilization that moves towards the pragmatics of many competing
literacies, almost all contradicting the intrinsic
characteristics of literacy embodied in the book. The life of
books is shorter (despite their being printed on acid-free
paper). Books have a decreasing degree of universality; more
books address limited groups of readers as opposed to a large
general market, not to mention the whole of humankind, as was
once the book's purpose. Books use specialized languages,
depending on their topics. The distinct ways these languages
convey contents frequently contradict the culturally
acknowledged condition of the book, and are a cause of concern to
people who are the products of (or adherents to) a civilization
based on books. More and more books end up as collections of
images with minimal commentary. Some are already delivered
together with a tape cassette or compact disk, to be heard rather
than read, to be seen rather than to engage the reader's mind.
Road Reading is a billboard trademark for recorded books.
Narrated by voices appropriate to the subject (a southern drawl
for a story like To Kill a Mockingbird; a cultivated voice for
Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities), the books compete with
red lights, landscapes, and other signs along the road. Many
books written in our day contain vulgar language and elevate
slang to the qualitative standard of fiction. There are books
that promise the excitement of a game (find the object or the
criminal). A reward, effectively replacing the satisfaction of
reading, will be handed to the lucky finder. The subject of
reading has also changed since the time the Bible and other
religious texts, dramas and poetry, philosophic and scientific
writings were entrusted to the printing press. Melodramatic
fiction, at least 200 years old, paved the way for pulp fiction
and today's surefire bestsellers based on gossip and escapism.
Our goal is to understand the nature of change in the book's
condition, why this change is a cause for concern, as well as
our own relation to books. To do this, we should examine the
transition that defines the identity and role of the writer and
reader in the new pragmatic context.
Why don't people read books?
"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" Clarisse McClellan
asks in Fahrenheit 451. (This book is also available in video
format and as a computer game.) Guy Montag, the fireman,
answers, "That is against the law." This conversation defines a
context: The group that still reads is able to pass the benefits
of their experience to people who are not allowed to read books.
In our days, no fireman is paid to set books ablaze. To the
contrary, many people are employed to save deteriorating books
printed in the past. But the question of whether people read any
of the books they buy or receive, or even save from destruction,
cannot be dismissed.
The majority of the books changing hands and actually read are
reference publications. The home contains an increasing number
of radios, television sets, CD players, electronic games, video
cassette recorders, and computers. The shelf space for books is
being taken up by other media. Instead of the personal library,
people consecrate space in their homes for media centers that
consume a great deal of their free time. Instead of the
permanence of the printed text, they prefer the variability of
continually changing programs, of scanning and sampling, and of
surfing the Internet. The digital highway supplies an enormous
amount of reference material. This material is, moreover, kept
up to date, something that is not so easy to accomplish with
bound sets of encyclopedias or even with the telephone book.
Books are not burned, but neither are they read with much
commitment. Scanning through a story or reading the summary on
the flip jacket, filling one's time during a commute or at the
airport is all that happens in most cases. A variety of books
are written for such purposes. Required reading for classes,
according to teachers, cannot exceed the attention span of their
pupils. Growing up under the formative influence of short cycles
and the expectation of quick conclusions to their acts,
youngsters oppose any reading that is not to the point (as they
see it). In most cases, outlines provide whatever knowledge
(information is probably a better word) is needed for a class or
for a final examination. The real filter of reading is the
multiple choice grid, not the satisfaction of immersion in a
world brought to life by words.
All this is almost the end of the story, not the substance of its
arguments. The arguments are manifold and all related to
characteristics of literacy. In the first place, publishers
simply discard the traditional reverence for books. They realize
that a book placed somewhere on the pedestal of adulation,
extended from the religious Book to books in general, keeps
readers away or makes them captive to interpretive prejudices.
How can one be involved in the practice of democracy without
extending it to books, thus giving Cervantes and Whitman a place
equal to that of the cheap, mass- produced pulp literature and
even the videotape? The experience of the book reveals a
double-edged sword, deriving mainly from the perception that the
book, as a vessel, sanctifies whatever it carries. Hitler's Mein
Kampf was such a book in Nazi Germany, and still is for Nazi
revivalists. In the former communist countries, the books of Marx
and Engels were sanctified, printed without end (after careful
editing), and forced upon readers of all age groups, especially
the young. Nobody could argue against even trivial factual
errors that slipped into their writings, into translations, or
into selective editions. Mao's little Red Book was distributed
free to everyone in China. In our day, Hitler and other authors
of the same bent are published. These very few examples follow a
long line of books dealing in indoctrination (religious,
ideological, economic), misrepresentation, and bigotry. As
insidious attempts to seduce for disreputable, if not frankly
criminal causes, they have inflicted damage on humanistic
expectations and on the practice of human-based values.
Champions of literacy point to the classics of history and
enlightenment and to the great writers of poetry, fiction, and
drama as the authentic heritage of the book. How much space do
they occupy on the shelves of bookstores, libraries, and homes?
In good faith and without exaggerating, one can easily conclude
that from all the books stored in homes and places of public
access, the majority should probably have never been written,
never mind printed or read. If these books and periodicals were
only repetitive of what had been said and thought previously,
they would not deserve such strong condemnation. The judgment
expressed above refers to words and thoughts whose shallowness
and deceit are consecrated through the associations that the
printed word entails.
Hard facts about books in the new pragmatic context confirm that
people, either due to illiteracy or a-literacy, read less and
use books less and less for their practical experiences. Titles
make it onto the bestseller lists only because they are sold, not
read. Intrinsic qualities-of writing, aesthetics, the ideas set
forth-are rarely taken into consideration, unless they confirm
the prejudices of their consumers. Books often make it onto the
bookshelf as a status symbol. In the early eighties, everyone in
Italy, Germany, and the USA wanted to display The Name of the
Rose. Or they become a subject of conversation-"It will be made
into a movie." But even such books remain unread to the last
page 70% of the time. Today, by virtue of faster writing and
printing, books compete with the newspaper in capturing the
sensational. The unholy alliance between the film industry,
television, and publishing houses is very adept at squeezing
the last possible drop of sleaze from an event of public interest
in order to catch one more viewer or purchaser of cheaply
manufactured books.
Because of a combination of many factors-long production cycles,
high cost of publishing and marketing, low transparency, rapid
acquisition of knowledge that makes high quality books obsolete
in one or two years, to name a few factors-the book has ceased
to be the major instrument for the dissemination of knowledge
related to practical experiences. First among the factors
affecting the book's role is that the rhythm of renewal and
conversion requires a medium that can keep pace with change.
Prior to the breakdown of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern
Block, the majority of books on politics, sociology, economics,
and culture pertinent to that part of the world became useless
from one day to the next as events and whims rendered their
content meaningless. Once the Eastern Block started to unravel,
even periodicals could not keep pace with events. All around the
world, strikes, various forms of social activism, political
debates, successive reorganizations, new borders, and new leaders
contradicted the image of stability settled in the books of
scholars and even in the evaluations issued by intelligence
agencies.
Not only politics required rewriting. Books on physics,
chemistry, mathematics, computing, genetics, and mind and brain
theory have to be rewritten as new discoveries and technologies
render obsolete facts associated with past observations published
as eternal truth. In some cases, the books were rewritten on
tape, as visual presentations impossible to fit in sentences or
between book covers, or on CD-ROM. More recently, books are
being rewritten as Internet publications or full-fledged Web
sites that can easily be kept current. Photocopies of selected
pages and articles already substitute for the book on the desks
of students, professors, scholars, and researchers. College
students, who are obliged to buy books, don't like to invest in
items that they know will be outdated and useless within a year.
The book will appear in a new edition, either because the
information has been updated or because the publisher wants to
make more money. Students prefer the videotape, so much closer
to tele-viewing, an experience that ultimately forms cognitive
characteristics different from those of reading and writing. Or
they prefer to find material on-line, again a cognitive
experience of a dynamic condition incompatible with the book.
The complexity of human practical experiences is as important as
the dynamics. The pragmatic framework that made literacy and the
book necessary was relatively homogeneous. Heterogeneity entails
a state of affairs for which books can only serve after the
experience, as a repository medium. Even in this documentary or
historic function, books capture less than what other media,
better adapted to sign processes irreducible to literacy, could.
For the experience as such, books become irrelevant, whether we
like it or not. The facts relating to the consequences of the
increased complexity of current pragmatics have yet to be
realized, much less recorded. What is available is the
accumulated human experience with alternate media, not
necessarily cheaper than books, but certainly better adapted to
instances of parallelism and distributed activities.
Books do justice to simultaneous temporal phenomena only at the
expense of capturing their essence. The nature of human praxis
is so radically disconnected from the nature of literacy
embodied in the book that one can no longer rely on it without
affecting the outcome. Practical experiences in which time is of
the essence, and activities that require synchronization or are
based on a configurational paradigm are different in nature from
writing and reading. To open a book, to look for the appropriate
page, and to read and understand the information slows down (or
stops) the process. The sequential nature of literacy misses the
requirement of synchronism and might not even lead to solutions
to questions related to non-sequential connections.
In addition to these major factors, there is the broader
background: Access to knowledge conveyed through literacy
implies a shared literate experience. Shared experience,
especially in open, dynamic societies, can no longer be assumed
as a given. There are cultural as well as physical differences
to be accounted for among all the human beings in the developed
world. There are the visually impaired and physically
handicapped who cannot use books. There are people with
conditions that do not allow for the deciphering of printed
letters and words. These individuals must rely on devices that
read for them, on senses other than sight, and on a good memory.
The decreased interest in books is indicative of a fundamentally
different human practical experience of self-constitution. In
line with the shift from manufacturing to service, books perform
mainly functions of incidental information (when not replaced by
a database), amusement, and filling time. Even if the great
novel, or great epic poem, or great drama were written, it would
go unnoticed in the loud concert of competing messages. It might
be that literature today is passionless, or it might be that the
seduction of commercial success brings everything to the common
denominator of return on an investment, regardless of cultural
reward. Books written to please, books published to satisfy
vanity, and books of impenetrable obscurity did not exactly
trigger reader interest. All in all, good and bad considered,
the general evolution does not testify to less literary talent.
The issue of quality is open to controversy, as it always has
been. Many books reflect a level of literacy that is not exactly
encouraging. Still, literature does not fail on its merits (or
lack thereof). It fails, rather, on the context of its
perception. Like anything else in the civilization of illiteracy,
the multiplication of choices resulted in the annihilation of a
sense of value and of effective criteria for differentiation
within the continuum of writing.
The overall development towards the civilization of illiteracy
suggests that the age of the book is being followed by an age of
alternative media. The promoters of literacy are doing their
best to resist this change. Their motto is "Read anything, as
long as you read." They effectively discount any and all other
means of acquiring knowledge, and totally disenfranchise
individuals who cannot read. There are many avenues to
self-constitution: all our senses-including common
sense-repetition and memory. Some of these avenues are more
efficient than the medium of the book. If they were not, they
would not be succeeding as they do. The champions of literacy
also imply that anything acquired through reading is good. The
harm that can be transmitted through the book medium can be
recorded in volumes. On the collective level, it has led to
persecution and violence, even mass destruction. On the
individual level, it can lead to imbalance. The child who is
forced to read at age three is being deprived of time for
developing other skills essential to his or her physical and
mental well-being. The cognitive repertory of these children is
being stunted by well meaning but misguided parents. It is being
stunted, too, by the market that sells literacy as though there
were no tomorrow despite the fact that literacy has lost its
dominant position in our lives.