The Future of the Printed Book

While Digital Books Are Here to Stay, the Printed Word Will Not Disappear Anytime Soon

If novelist Robert Coover had his way, all book shops would close their books and doors forever. Coover's vision of books is one in which they will be written, distributed and read by a computer or some other electronic reading device; a future without printed books. Coover, who is also the founder of the Electronic Literature Association, is not alone in his vision of the future. He is joined by other writers and cyberpunks who claim we are on the verge of a publishing and reading revolution greater than that brought about by the Gutenberg press. Whether in the New York Times Book Review or at writers' conventions, Coover's message is the same: "The book is dead." But to paraphrase an even greater novelist than Coover, "The news of the book's death has been greatly exaggerated."

There are several things working against Coover's vision of the future. First in order to read a digital book, one must own a computer or a digital reading device like Sony's E-book Reader or Amazon's Kindle. While most of us in developed countries can afford a computer or digital reader, it is going to be a long time before everyone in developing countries can afford one.Secondly, the book is at present the optimal reading device. Hundreds of years of evolution have brought the book to the place where it is easy to hold and easy to read. During that same time period, the human body has changed very little, meaning that all reading devices must take into consideration the human anatomy if they want to be successful, particularly the human hands and eyes. Ancient scrolls and clay tablets were not something you could curl up in bed with, neither is the computer. While it might be relatively easy to read a newspaper or magazine on-line, I find that reading a book on my computer is hard on my eyes, my nerves and my buttocks.