I Was Wrong About the Death of the Book
And Umberto Eco was right.
In there, @
[email protected] is the voice of calm salving the panic of Sven Birkerts. Then again, she says: “Seeing books thrust into the service of comfort and sanity and good taste, I started wanting to recover the book’s power to upset and unsettle and even anger readers.” 2/
Andrew Piper is in there, too: “We cannot think about our electronic future without contending with its antecedent, the bookish past.” That has been my quest. “Technologies don’t just happen. At least not yet. We are still agents in this story, and we have some choices to make.” 3/
And here is Jessica Pressman: "The book has historically symbolized privacy, leisure, individualism, knowledge, and power. This means that the book has been the emblem for the very experiences that must be renegotiated in a digital era: proximity, interiority, authenticity." 4/
I love this quote from Umberto Eco: “The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.” There is my recantation. More from his conversations here: 5
I say: :The book is the book. It is a space between covers to be tamed. Its finitude makes demands upon author and editor, who decide what fits, what is worth saying, and what they hope is worth discussing and preserving—though the reader is the one who will ultimately make those decisions, who finishes making the book." 6/
Jeff Jarvis