The Future of the Book

by Geoffrey Nunberg

Book Overview

The death of the book has been duly announced, and with it the end of brick-and-mortar libraries, traditional publishers, linear narrative, authorship, and disciplinarity, along with the emergence of a more equitable discursive order. These essays suggest that it won't be that simple. The digitization of discourse will not be effected without some wrenching social and cultural dislocations. The contributors to this volume are enthusiastic about the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520204506
• ISBN13: 9780520204508
• Release Date: December 1996
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

One of the best meditations on old and new media

The "death of the book" is supposedly in evidence everywhere: in the rise of the Web, the growth of video games, the troubled state of the publishing industry, etc. etc., ad infinitum. But as "The Future of the Book" shows, this death is greatly exaggerated. Part of its brilliance is that its contributors manages to both look forward and look back, to remind us of the many transformations that the book has undergone through history; it also manages to balance enthusiasm for new media with a realistic appraisal of how books will be used in the future, and what place they will have in literate culture. Individually, the essays are somewhat uneven some are better than others, but the pieces by James O'Donnell and Geoffrey Nunberg are especially good. The collection overall is extremely valuable.

Strong on history of the book; weak on computer texts.

THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK, edited by Geoffrey Nunberg, frames the debate about the future of the book in the digital age with a lot of erudition but also some unwarranted concerns. Several essays provide invaluable information about the history and development of the book. Most of the essayists are concerned that computers will radically alter the concept of the book as a legal object, undermining current concepts of the author and the reader as well. They will disrupt established publishing and distribution methods for texts. They will decentralize control of information currently dominated by libraries, universities, and the government. Computers even threaten to redefine the nature of texts and, more important, the nature and function of language. But cyberspace will not destroy the concept of authorship and texts as legal entities. If you have doubts, just read those dire warning labels about copyright infringement on the latest web page you surfed or on the that software you just bought. Geoffrey Nunberg sees hypertext leading to a loss of quality information because he thinks publishing on the Internet is not controlled as well as it is by print publishers. To him, "Computers don't preserve the social and material boundaries ... they disrupt the properties embodied in the notion of publishing." Nunberg is correct. But I don't think removing control of publishing from the hands of a few communications' conglomerates, whose bottom line is money, is such a terrible thing. Others, like Nunberg, are also concerned about the breakdown of catalogs and classifications of information by hypertext because collections won't be materially constrained. The chaos that surely will follow is to him akin to "removing library walls and seeing the reading rooms fill up with street people. "Understand, the government, universities, and libraries have controlled information and access to it for centuries. They have done a pretty good job. But like other bureaucracies, they won't tender their control easily. Despite this, computers are making revolutionary changes in how information is accessed. And most of those changes suggest that it will be a more democratic, less elitist system, at least for a while. Virtual Reality (VR), more than hypertext, is seen by many of these essayists as the major threat to the book as the purveyor of our culture and a particular threat to verbal language. A good part of these essayists' concern has to do with an apparent lack of closure to VR worlds. It is true that VR will create entertainment, work, and instructional environments all over the known landscape. There is, however, a vast difference between having a VR experience and writing a novel about a VR eperience. That is, there is a critical difference between looking through and experiencing virtual worlds and looking at and creating texts about them as Richard Lanham points out elsewhere. The difference between experienci