A couple of pieces by Robert Darnton have come to my attention lately. I thought a post on the history and future of the book would provide a nice, lively interlude between all the Samuel Johnson coverage lately.
First, apropos of his new book, Darnton provides the sobering statistics that the book is not only not dead, but that the ebook represents the merest sliver of the market for all books:
Yet the general lack of concern for history among Americans has made us vulnerable to exaggerated notions of historic change—and so has our fascination with technology. The current obsession with cellular devices, electronic readers and digitization has produced a colossal case of false consciousness. As new electronic devices arrive on the market, we think we have been precipitated into a new era. We tout “the Information Age” as if information did not exist in the past. Meanwhile, e-books and devices like the Kindle represent less than 1% of the expenditure on books in the United States.
History shows us that one medium does not necessarily displace another—at least not in the short run. Manuscript publishing flourished long after Gutenberg’s invention; newspapers did not wipe out the printed book; the radio did not replace the newspaper; television did not destroy the radio; and the Internet did not make viewers abandon their television sets. Every age has been an age of information, each in its own way. In my new book, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (PublicAffairs), I make that very point, because I believe we cannot envisage the future—or make sense of the present—unless we study the past. Not necessarily because history repeats itself or teaches us lessons, but because it can help to orient us when faced with the challenges of new technologies.
His point is finely stated, I think. Books aren’t dead. Americans, as is our wont, are prone to infatuation with anything that promises to thrust us across some kind of millennial marker and into the future. Darnton, a good historian, instead asks us to go…
…by remembering the past so that we can orient ourselves to face future challenges. His position is balanced and sane, I think.
he second article is a Fine Books Magazine review of Darnton’s new book. In it, there are quotes that describe Darnton’s decade of work on an ebook and his vision of what the form might eventually be able to do:
Darton’s ebook is one that won’t translate well to the Kindle, with its notoriously bad image quality and (as far as I know) inability to play back music. What is most interesting about his proposal is the qualitative leap past the Kindle entirely. His vision of the ebook offers interesting possibilities to scholars, including the chance to integrate scholarly and popular publishing. Think of it: introductions to chapters might be written in a more accessible or popular style, with links to scholarly notes, essays, or dissertations available at various points. That would be game-changing in terms of the current divide between the two kinds of writing. And it might be that there would be a larger audience for scholarship if it was easily accessible. I’ve noticed that when I hand out photocopies (OK, pdfs) of a heavily-annotated text, my students invariably dig into the footnotes. Their curiosity is kindled (no pun intended) by the fact that there’s a note on something, and they want to find out what it is. I warn them not to get bogged down–Samuel Johnson warned that notes “refrigerate” the mind, distract the reader from appreciating the whole, and eventually cause such tedium that the reader quits the book, blaming it rather than the notes–but many of my students don’t listen, the little Faustuses.
Darnton also has a nice response to the whole Cushing Library debacle:
“It’s naïve to think that all information is online. It’s also naïve to think that all information is in books, either,” he said. “I see this vast world of information in many different forms, and the notion that digital is going to encompass it all is just wrong-headed.”
And this is precisely what I meant when I said that apathy plus technolust spells the death of critical thinking. Few people think as critically about books as Robert Darnton, one of the world’s foremost historians of the book. And yet here we have a very respectable private school, filled no doubt with motivated and concerned teachers and administrators, and the barest whiff of a new technology drives them to destroy a collection built over generations. As you can see if you follow the link back to my earlier post, the words of the administrators. teachers, and students reveal that they haven’t given the matter much if any thought. There’s state-of-the-art thinking on this complicated subject, but there’s no reason to give that even a cursory look: no, the technology is already available; technology is the future; ergo, time to destroy the past. The world would be a saner and steadier place if there were more Darntons in it, but alas it is overrun with iconoclasts. That too is just wrong-headed.
Perplexed with Narrow Passages 
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November 14, 2009 at 7:23 am
williamhwandless
I’ve always been a fan of both/and approaches to books and technology; the kicker for me is that the most forward-thinking technophiles, particularly in university administration, seem to have an appalling blind spot when it comes to their acquisitiveness.
The first issue they neglect seems to be upgrade dependence, that need to sink more money into virtual maintenance after an initial investment. It’s analogous to one of the abuses of the textbook industry, the habit of issuing new editions of texts that are not substantially different from previous editions, all in the name of outmoding a product already on the market. [This semester I ordered the 3rd edition of a book on cultural studies that is still available from UGA for $20; the bookstore has written me twice, urging me to buy the 4th edition of the book (since purchased by Longman and reissued in an almost identical form) for $45.] We keep upgrading Blackboard here, but only a tiny fraction of the faculty and student body uses the new gewgaws and add-ons. Of course, we also sink quite a bit of money into seminars and online tutorials to teach us how to use these new tools, throwing new money after old to justify that hefty initial investment.
Speaking of Blackboard, I wonder how folks at the Cushing Library are going to deal with maintenance downtime, system outages, hacks, and more banal happenings like power outages? Once an instructor embraces a new technology, she may become bound to it; I can think of at least a dozen instances in 2009 when I ran into a colleague slinking back from class because an outage or hiccup of some kind killed her lesson plans.
While we’re at it, let’s talk about the investment needed to keep all the classroom tech up to code. We have excellent tech support here, but the hardware gets upgraded on a rotating basis; the classrooms on the first floor are in tip-top shape this year, but on the third? Not so much. I’ve had to abandon plans (to show a video clip from the web, to call up the library homepage) more than once because the equipment wasn’t robust enough to handle the application or because the latest version of some needful program had yet to be installed. Tech dependence effectively requires universities to commit to infrastructural upgrades at a rate of refreshment most don’t bother to consider.
And technophiles? Kindly consider the essential functionality of a program or system instead of the hi-fi shiny. Our library search engine, as a very fine example, won’t turn up the OED if one types in the keywords “Oxford English Dictionary.” What we do get, however, is a fancy “word cloud” that generates such valuable research cues as “bible,” “sports,” “rexford,” and “reactionary.” That’s just oodles of help when you’re trying to dig up a definition or an etymology.
Another word of caution for the early adopters: beware the pilot program. I’ve been poring over some assessment materials here to work through the process of departmental review, and our virtual archives are littered with files and folders stuffed with the output of one-time tech experiments. Some of that content strikes me as enormously valuable (my assessment hinges on the produce of a survey utility we once had funding for), but technology generally requires continued support to be useful. Investing thousands of dollars from a one-time budget allocation to experiment with a utility you might not keep is a fine way to even out balance sheets, not integrate tech into your curricular culture.
And the technically adventurous probably ought to think ahead when it comes to cost effectiveness. Up until September the university used one of the olde skool anti-plagiarism utilities, but number-crunching told them it was time to consider a more cost-effective platform. Administrative folks decided it was time to migrate…and thus all the old papers that had been filed away for several years were lost. The new utility depends on an archive of old course materials, just like the old, so it won’t actually be useful until that repository has been refilled. It’s probably good for our young instructors get some practice bluffing in the classrooms, but it would be better if our anti-plagiarism practices actually had some muscle.
That’s a bit of a harangue, but I hope it reflects a realistic set of sensibilities that might responsibly inform tech transitions. There are valuable utilities and promising approaches out there, ones that might enrich student learning immeasurably in conjunction with plain ol’ book-larnin’, but a bit of promethean perspective should probably come into play before administrators race into the brave new world.
November 16, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Christopher Vilmar
Jesus, Chatty Cathy, who pulled your string?
But seriously. Excellent comments, to which I’m not sure my response will be adequate or even in the ballpark. But here goes.
As to the equivalence between upgrade-dependence and textbook abuses: exactly. And yet there’s no legislation in the works to curb upgrade dependence, is there? Perhaps it’s not a nefarious plot, but simply the result of the problem being new enough that legislators–a notoriously slow bunch–haven’t gotten word of it yet. Who can say.
Library search engines are great things, but it’s incredible what you discover on the shelves when you mosey on up there and eyeball the damned things. Amazing, monstrous–perhaps even unearthly.
We too switched to some new-fangled anti-plagiarism utility. Truth be told, I wasn’t a big fan of the old one, which seemed to have gotten “lazy,” i.e., dependent on checking papers against its files rather than against the internet. If I have to go out and google every suspicious phrase, I’m back to square one and can do that without paying even the quite minimal institutional fee (or at least it was for us). I used to do that back in ye olde graduate alma mater. I even gave a talk on it oncet.
I’m certainly no technophobe, and not quite a technophile on the order of mutual friends like Dr. Jones up Connecticut-way, but your last paragraph sums it up nicely. A little, I dunno, foresight and thought might be nice before the university sinks more millions into computer infrastructure while simultaneously furloughing me.