Book
Ah, the book. The perennial favorite of all doomsayers and harbingers of death. Book has been on the brink of obsolescence since inception of every new medium from telegraph to Twitter. The whole eschatologic narrative of media history seems to be based on „death of the book“.
Then again, I’m sure someone proclaimed the Church dead right after Gutenberg unveiled the printing press during his keynote.
What’s been proclaimed as the „death of the book“ is actually three deaths all rolled into one:
death of the reader and the author
death of the book as a textual unit
death of paper book
For some, books are tokens of knowledge and transcendence, for others, they are a token of social stratum. People look smarter with a full library. Some of them actually read the stuff. Sure, with advent of social media and the web, reading modes do slowly change with glacial transition from barthesian readerly, linear text to hypertext-like writings, with McLuhan famously calling this the Death of the Book. We tend to read a lot of discrete texts of various kinds, much of it online - keitai and twitter novels are a prime example. But these neat little experiments tend to cease when meaty publishing deals for „real books“ come. Big media is still where the money is. And big media does books.
So the notion that the book as a unified textual unit is in decline, with authorship going down with it, is rather debatable. Or, wrong. People apparently do read less books than they buy. Worldwide statistics suggest that more book titles are introduced each year than the year before, even in smaller EU markets. Bowker, the ultimate authority on ISBN, counts more than 300 000 new book titles in 2009 alone. As for sales, from 2001 to 2011, book sales increased 42 % in UK alone.
The book market is alive and kicking.
The delicate object of physical, printed book is less so. As early as 1968, visionaries like typesetter Hermann Zapf predicted decline of printed book and a radical shift to electronic publishing. Yep, that is happening. Slowly (sales of books and ebooks cannot be compared, figures are mostly kept secret).
Is that a good thing? Sod the soothing texture of paper, disregard the inviting smell of printed page. The number one reason we may stick for paper books for a long time coming may be the very thing that makes ebooks so enticing.
You can always have some more.
More books, more stories to read, more e-mail to answer, more tweets to share. I find it increasingly difficult to actually read stuff on my iPad for this exact reason. While ebooks are infinitely more accessible, less expensive (or are they?) and have all kinds of bells and whistles, the very act of undisturbed reading is next to impossible. You just can’t get lost in a story with push notifications blaring all over your display. You could turn that off, but you know you won’t.
So, is book dead? No, no, and not yet.