Fahrenheit 451, Fiction to Fact? Future of the Book

Fahrenheit 451, Fiction to Fact? The Future of the Book

As librarian one of the questions I am continually asked is, "are you still buying books?" This is always asked with a nervous laugh, looking to me for reasurance. I have a hard time imagining a world without books, more importantly a library without books. But my purpose here todat is to take a glance at the possible future. Will the book as we know it die from lack of interest? Will electronic technology of bits and bytes replace the musty smell and tactile natu re of paper? Where will my desk be placed in a library without walls. To make this investigation more relevant to the topic at hand, I looked ony to electronic texts in my education on this venture. Neither did I use a conventional library. Pretty sca ry stuff for a librarian. I leave it to you to judge my success.

More and more we appear to be in in what has been described as the:

William Gibson - Agrippa,: William Gibson and Dennis Ashbrough. December 9, 1992 released book of etched pictures and a floppy disk. The disk contained the text of the work. As text was accessed "read" the disk was automatically erased in sequence by internal program. Made public one day at museums across America and on the Internet.
Future of the Book of the Future: A traveling exhibit that looks at the book as a creation that disseminates knowledge. Travels from Florida State University, to University of Alaska, Anchorage to Keio University Fujisawa Japan
Adrian Butash - Bless this Food: Amazing Graces in Praise of Food: Electronic book of prayers and graces from religions around the world. Text all has links to other web sites. Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit from the Library of Congress is one. It begins to break the linear nature of the book.
Web Sites: Become means of personal publishing. Over 12,000/year have visited the Augustana Library web site where we have made portions of our rare material available to the world through the Internet. Mine only 250 but will have this paper available to anyon e who wants to read it.

: - Breaks the publishing system
: - This opens up world to all would be authors
: - But means an end to checks and balances

Hypertext: Hyperstacks and Toolbook authoring software create a new type of studies where the reader interacts with text to create there own personal text. Last year at this Humanities Conference we saw a demonstration of the Perseus Project where students stud y ancient Greece and can create their own text in the process.
Michael Joyce, Jerome Bruner, Erin Moure and others: take the Hyperstack a step further developing hyperfiction where the reader interacts as an equal partner with the writer in the creation of an ever changing text.

A New Gutenberg Revolution

: Duke Federigo of Urbino's agent described his library "all books were superlatively good and written with pen; had there been one printed book, it would have been ashamed in such company."

Earliest known call for press censorship was from classical scholar Niccolo Perotti asked Pope in 1471 to establish prepublication censorship of Andrea de Bussi's to ensure the editions were carefully edited.
Johannes Trithemius, Benedictine from Frankfurt, "anything on paper will not last very long. Writing placed on skins can last for a thousand years. He predicted the shell lives of books at 200 years. Books published on non acid-fre e paper doesn't even make it that long. Desinegrating books is a tragedy facing all 20th Century libraries.

1485 scholars in Nürnberg warning that wide distribution of errors and consistency of errors in printed material had very powerful effect. All copies of printed book are alike therefore impossible to compare and correct.
Aside --
We are still plagued by this problem. During the 1960s until 1979, Fahrenheit 451, the book we celebrate here for its stand against censorship was insidiously censored by the editors at Ballantine Books. Over a span of some 48 reprintings, many editions aimed at the high school market, editors managed to "clean" up the work. Between Oct., 1953 and the 44th printing in 1977, some 52 pages had been completely reset and in the process 98 unauthorized and substantative changes were made to the text. Mostly it consisted of getting rid of the hells and damns and offending references to body parts like navels.

Sounds very much like what we say today about electronic media. We, like the monks of old are living lives that are deeply entwined with the technology of the age they with writing and we with the printed page.
: Earliest known call for press censorship was from classical scholar Niccolo Perotti asked Pope in 1471 to establish prepublication censorship of Andrea de Bussi's to ensure the editions were carefully edited.
Johannes Trithemius, Benedictine from Frankfurt, "anything on paper will not last very long. Writing placed on skins can last for a thousand years. He predicted the shell lives of books at 200 years. Books published on non acid-fre e paper doesn't even make it that long. Desinegrating books is a tragedy facing all 20th Century libraries.

1485 scholars in Nürnberg warning that wide distribution of errors and consistency of errors in printed material had very powerful effect. All copies of printed book are alike therefore impossible to compare and correct.
Aside --
We are still plagued by this problem. During the 1960s until 1979, Fahrenheit 451, the book we celebrate here for its stand against censorship was insidiously censored by the editors at Ballantine Books. Over a span of some 48 reprintings, many editions aimed at the high school market, editors managed to "clean" up the work. Between Oct., 1953 and the 44th printing in 1977, some 52 pages had been completely reset and in the process 98 unauthorized and substantative changes were made to the text. Mostly it consisted of getting rid of the hells and damns and offending references to body parts like navels.

Sounds very much like what we say today about electronic media. We, like the monks of old are living lives that are deeply entwined with the technology of the age they with writing and we with the printed page.
: Johannes Trithemius, Benedictine from Frankfurt, "anything on paper will not last very long. Writing placed on skins can last for a thousand years. He predicted the shell lives of books at 200 years. Books published on non acid-fre e paper doesn't even make it that long. Desinegrating books is a tragedy facing all 20th Century libraries.

1485 scholars in Nürnberg warning that wide distribution of errors and consistency of errors in printed material had very powerful effect. All copies of printed book are alike therefore impossible to compare and correct.
Aside --
We are still plagued by this problem. During the 1960s until 1979, Fahrenheit 451, the book we celebrate here for its stand against censorship was insidiously censored by the editors at Ballantine Books. Over a span of some 48 reprintings, many editions aimed at the high school market, editors managed to "clean" up the work. Between Oct., 1953 and the 44th printing in 1977, some 52 pages had been completely reset and in the process 98 unauthorized and substantative changes were made to the text. Mostly it consisted of getting rid of the hells and damns and offending references to body parts like navels.

Sounds very much like what we say today about electronic media. We, like the monks of old are living lives that are deeply entwined with the technology of the age they with writing and we with the printed page.
: 1485 scholars in Nürnberg warning that wide distribution of errors and consistency of errors in printed material had very powerful effect. All copies of printed book are alike therefore impossible to compare and correct.
Aside --
We are still plagued by this problem. During the 1960s until 1979, Fahrenheit 451, the book we celebrate here for its stand against censorship was insidiously censored by the editors at Ballantine Books. Over a span of some 48 reprintings, many editions aimed at the high school market, editors managed to "clean" up the work. Between Oct., 1953 and the 44th printing in 1977, some 52 pages had been completely reset and in the process 98 unauthorized and substantative changes were made to the text. Mostly it consisted of getting rid of the hells and damns and offending references to body parts like navels.

Sounds very much like what we say today about electronic media. We, like the monks of old are living lives that are deeply entwined with the technology of the age they with writing and we with the printed page.
Aside --: We are still plagued by this problem. During the 1960s until 1979, Fahrenheit 451, the book we celebrate here for its stand against censorship was insidiously censored by the editors at Ballantine Books. Over a span of some 48 reprintings, many editions aimed at the high school market, editors managed to "clean" up the work. Between Oct., 1953 and the 44th printing in 1977, some 52 pages had been completely reset and in the process 98 unauthorized and substantative changes were made to the text. Mostly it consisted of getting rid of the hells and damns and offending references to body parts like navels.
: Sounds very much like what we say today about electronic media. We, like the monks of old are living lives that are deeply entwined with the technology of the age they with writing and we with the printed page.

Where does this Leave us?

Books still have appeal for the here and now. While all this is happening books are a growth industry. - 50,000 titles/yr in the U.S. -- 137 a day - Books are a larger mass medium than TV and motion picture industries combined. - Book Industry Study Group estimates spending on books to reach $30.8 billion by 1999, up from $18 billion in 1989. Probably most of this will be on Internet for Dummies books Growth of the Web is phenomenal -Doubles in size every 50 days -One homepage created every 4 seconds. - How will the electronic book develop? Most still recognize the essential linear nature of the reading experience. Joe Jacobson at MIT's Media Lab is developing electronic paper. An electronic book that can be a real page turner. What will happen as the MTV/Nintendo generation matures? Are today's youth more comfortable with mixed media and a more global nonlinear approach?: - 50,000 titles/yr in the U.S. -- 137 a day; - Books are a larger mass medium than TV and motion picture industries combined.; - Book Industry Study Group estimates spending on books to reach $30.8 billion by 1999, up from $18 billion in 1989. Probably most of this will be on Internet for Dummies books
Growth of the Web is phenomenal -Doubles in size every 50 days -One homepage created every 4 seconds. - How will the electronic book develop? Most still recognize the essential linear nature of the reading experience. Joe Jacobson at MIT's Media Lab is developing electronic paper. An electronic book that can be a real page turner. What will happen as the MTV/Nintendo generation matures? Are today's youth more comfortable with mixed media and a more global nonlinear approach?: -Doubles in size every 50 days; -One homepage created every 4 seconds.; - How will the electronic book develop?
Most still recognize the essential linear nature of the reading experience. Joe Jacobson at MIT's Media Lab is developing electronic paper. An electronic book that can be a real page turner.
What will happen as the MTV/Nintendo generation matures?
Are today's youth more comfortable with mixed media and a more global nonlinear approach?

Wrap up

Recently another historian told me she was surely glad that she was not a historian trying to research this period in history. The documentation of personal diaries and journals simply isn't part of our culture. Think how the Civil War came alive to millions of Television viewers because it was the first war where an educated/literate populace documented the event in such moving letters and journals. She feared that this type of documentation is lost in this age. However , that may be true for the middle of this century when the telephone became ubiquitous. Letter writing languished and it still has in its paper format. But....

The digital means of communication we see today is all recordable. E-mail and personal web sites with their deeply personal nature will be gold mines for future researchers.

The Internet Archive - Brewster Kahle: - 30 million web pages on 225,000 sites; - 1-10 terrabytes to be archived .... sounds like a lot but..; - Still less than half of the 20 terrabytes in ASCII text represented by the 20 million books in the Library of Congress.

I leave you with the image from the Truffaut's version of Fahrenheit 451 where the fireman, Montag, meets up with the fugitives who walk along the peaceful river reciting their memorized books waiting for the time when the world is safe for books again. For them the book had died at the hands of malevolent forces but was reborn in another form. Perhaps the book may die in the future at the hands of dispassionate technology but will be reborn in a form that will still serve the dissemination of serious t hought, unbridled laughter, and joyful wonder.

Late age of print

A New Gutenberg Revolution

Where does this Leave us?

Wrap up