On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text.
[Snip]
The introduction of the printing press brought a similarly enormous change to the nature of reading. One of the most interesting figures in that transformation is the great Benedictine scholar Trithemius. He lived in Sponheim in the 15th century and managed to amass a library fully half the size of the Vatican library, an incredible achievement. He was also the author of "In Praise of Scribes," the foremost defense of scribal practice, in favor of writing things out and against printing them.
[Snip]
But I am immensely excited for the new phase of the book. So far the new technology has been called the "e-reader," a term obviously picked by engineers, not poets. In literary terms it's a transbook, by which I mean that it is the book which can contain all books.
[Snip]
We are still in early days, but it is obvious where the transbook is headed: It will eventually provide access to all text that is non-copyright, and to the purchase of every book in or out of "print." Kindle 2's boast of being able to hold 1,500 titles will eventually sound as ludicrous as those early ads for floppy disks boasting that they could hold up to 64k of data. We will want everything and we will get it. Possibly there will eventually develop a subscription service, which provides access to all books for a monthly fee. At any rate, a single object will contain the contents of all the world's libraries. It's just a matter of when that will happen. And who will profit.
Stephen Marche is the pop culture columnist at Esquire magazine.
FreePint Shop:
VIP LiveWire:
