The Future Of Books

We have three types of memory. The first one is organic, which is the memory made offlesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind hasknown two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets andobelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However, this second type isalso the electronic memory of today's computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind ofmemory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses, again well known in this country, andthen on books, made of paper. Let me disregard the fact that at a certain moment the vellum of the firstcodices were of an organic origin, and the fact that the first paper was made with rugs and not with wood. Letme speak for the sake of simplicity of vegetal memory in order to designate books.

This place has been in the past and will be in the future devoted to the conservation of books; thus, it isand will be a temple of vegetal memory. Libraries, over the centuries, have been the most important way ofkeeping our collective wisdom. They were and still are a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what wehave forgotten and what we still do not know. If you will allow me to use such a metaphor, a library is thebest possible imitation, by human beings, of a divine mind, where the whole universe is viewed and understoodat the same time. A person able to store in his or her mind the information provided by a great library wouldemulate in some way the mind of God. In other words, we have invented libraries because we know that we do nothave divine powers, but we try to do our best to imitate them.

To build, or better to rebuild, today one of the greatest libraries of the world might sound like achallenge, or a provocation. It happens frequently that in newspaper articles or academic papers some authors,facing the new computer and internet era, speak of the possible "death of books". However, if booksare to disappear, as did the obelisks or the clay tablets of ancient civilisations, this would not be a goodreason to abolish libraries. On the contrary, they should survive as museums conserving the finds of the past,in the same way as we conserve the Rosetta Stone in a museum because we are no longer accustomed to carvingour documents on mineral surfaces.

Yet, my praise for libraries will be a little more optimistic. I belong to the people who still believethat printed books have a future and that all fears à propos of their disappearance are only the lastexample of other fears, or of milleniaristic terrors about the end of something, the world included.

In the course of many interviews I have been obliged to answer questions of this sort: "Will the newelectronic media make books obsolete? Will the Web make literature obsolete? Will the new hypertextualcivilisation eliminate the very idea of authorship?" As you can see, if you have a well-balanced normalmind, these are different questions and, considering the apprehensive mode in which they are asked, one mightthink that the interviewer would feel reassured when your answer is, "No, keep cool, everything isOK". Mistake. If you tell such people that books, literature, authorship will not disappear, they lookdesperate. Where, then, is the scoop? To publish the news that a given Nobel Prize winner has died is a pieceof news; to say that he is alive and well does not interest anybody -- except him, I presume.

What I want to do today is to try to unravel a skein of intertwined apprehensionsabout different problems. To clarify our ideas about these different problems can also help us to understandbetter what we usually mean by book, text, literature, interpretation, and so on. Thus you will see how from asilly question many wise answers can be produced, and such is probably the cultural function of naiveinterviews.

Let us start with an Egyptian story, even though one told by a Greek. According to Plato in Phaedruswhen Hermes, or Theut, the alleged inventor of writing, presented his invention to the Pharaoh Thamus, thePharaoh praised such an unheard of technique supposed to allow human beings to remember what they wouldotherwise forget. But Thamus was not completely happy. "My skillful Theut," he said, "memory isa great gift that ought to be kept alive by continuous training. With your invention people will no longer beobliged to train their memory. They will remember things not because of an internal effort, but by mere virtueof an external device."

We can understand the preoccupation of Thamus. Writing, like any other new technological invention, wouldhave made torpid the human power which it pretended to substitute and reinforce. Writing was dangerous becauseit decreased the powers of mind by offering human beings a petrified soul, a caricature of mind, a mineralmemory.

Plato's text is ironical, naturally. Plato was writing down his argument against writing. But he was alsopretending that his discourse was told by Socrates, who did not write (since he did not publish, he perishedin the course of the academic fight.) Nowadays, nobody shares Thamus's preoccupations for two very simplereasons. First of all, we know that books are not ways of making somebody else think in our place; on thecontrary, they are machines that provoke further thoughts. Only after the invention of writing was it possibleto write such a masterpiece of spontaneous memory as Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Secondly,if once upon a time people needed to train their memories in order to remember things, after the invention ofwriting they had also to train their memories in order to remember books. Books challenge and improve memory;they do not narcotise it. However, the Pharaoh was instantiating an eternal fear: the fear that a newtechnological achievement could kill something that we consider precious and fruitful.

I used the verb to kill on purpose because more or less 14 centuries later Victor Hugo, in his NotreDame de Paris, narrated the story of a priest, Claude Frollo, looking in sadness at the towers of hiscathedral. The story of Notre Dame de Paris takes places in the XVth century after the invention ofprinting. Before that, manuscripts were reserved to a restricted elite of literate persons, and the only thingto teach the masses about the stories of the Bible, the life of Christ and of the Saints, the moralprinciples, even the deeds of national history or the most elementary notions of geography and naturalsciences (the nature of unknown peoples and the virtues of herbs or stones), was provided by the images of acathedral. A mediaeval cathedral was a sort of permanent and unchangeable TV programme that was supposed totell people everything indispensable for their everyday life, as well as for their eternal salvation.

Now, however, Frollo has on his table a printed book, and he whispers "ceci tuera cela": thiswill kill that, or, in other words, the book will kill the cathedral, the alphabet will kill images. The bookwill distract people from their most important values, encouraging unnecessary information, freeinterpretation of the Scriptures, insane curiosity.

During the sixties, Marshall McLuhan wrote his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, where he announced thatthe linear way of thinking supported by the invention of printing was on the verge of being substituted by amore global way of perceiving and understanding through TV images or other kinds of electronic devices. If notMcLuhan, then certainly many of his readers pointed their finger first at a TV screen and then to a printedbook, saying "this will kill that". Were McLuhan still among us, today he would have been the firstto write something like "Gutenberg strikes back". Certainly, a computer is an instrument by means ofwhich one can produce and edit images, certainly instructions are provided by means of icons; but it isequally certainly that the computer has become first of all an alphabetic instrument. On its screen there runwords and lines, and in order to use a computer you must be able to write and to read.

Are there differences between the first Gutenberg Galaxy and the second one? Many. First of all, only thearchaeological word processors of the early eighties provided a sort of linear written communication. Today,computers are no longer linear in so far as they display a hypertextual structure. Curiously enough, thecomputer was born as a Turing machine, able to make a single step at a time, and in fact, in the depths of themachine, language still works in this way, by a binary logic, of zero-one, zero-one. However, the machine'soutput is no longer linear: it is an explosion of semiotic fireworks. Its model is not so much a straight lineas a real galaxy where everybody can draw unexpected connections between different stars to form new celestialimages at any new navigation point.

Yet it is exactly at this point that our unravelling activity must start because byhypertextual structure we usually mean two very different phenomena. First, there is the textual hypertext. Ina traditional book one must read from left to right (or right to left, or up to down, according to differentcultures) in a linear way. One can obviously skip through the pages, one -- once arrived at page 300 -- can goback to check or re- read something at page 10 -- but this implies physical labour. In contrast to this, ahypertextual text is a multidimensional network or a maze in which every point or node can be potentiallyconnected with any other node. Second, there is the systemic hypertext. The WWW is the Great Mother of AllHypertexts, a world-wide library where you can, or you will in short time, pick up all the books you wish. TheWeb is the general system of all existing hypertexts.

Such a difference between text and system is enormously important, and we shall come back to it. For themoment, let me liquidate the most naive among the frequently asked questions, in which this difference is notyet so clear. But it will be in answering this first question that we will be able to clarify our furtherpoint. The naive question is: "Will hypertextual diskettes, the internet, or multimedia systems makebooks obsolete?" With this question we have arrived at the final chapter in our this-will-kill-thatstory. But even this question is a confused one, since it can be formulated in two different ways: (a) willbooks disappear as physical objects, and (b) will books disappear as virtual objects?

Let me first answer the first question. Even after the invention of printing, books were never the onlyinstrument for acquiring information. There were also paintings, popular printed images, oral teaching, and soon. Simply, books have proved to be the most suitable instrument for transmitting information. There are twosorts of book: those to be read and those to be consulted. As far as books-to-be-read are concerned, thenormal way of reading them is the one that I would call the "detective story way". You start frompage one, where the author tells you that a crime has been committed, you follow every path of the detectionprocess until the end, and finally you discover that the guilty one was the butler. End of the book and end ofyour reading experience. Notice that the same thing happens even if you read, let us say, a philosophicaltreatise. The author wants you to open the book at its first page, to follow the series of questions heproposes, and to see how he reaches certain final conclusions. Certainly, scholars can re-read such a book byjumping from one page to another, trying to isolate a possible link between a statement in the first chapterand one in the last. They can also decide to isolate, let us say, every occurrence of the word"idea" in a given work, thus skipping hundreds of pages in order to focus their attention only onpassages dealing with that notion. However, these are ways of reading that the layman would consider asunnatural.

Then they are books to be consulted, like handbooks and encyclopaedias. Encyclopaedias are conceived inorder to be consulted and never read from the first to the last page. A person reading the EncyclopaediaBritannica every night before sleeping, from the first to the last page, would be a comic character.Usually, one picks up a given volume of an encyclopaedia in order to know or to remember when Napoleon died,or what is the chemical formula for sulphuric acid. Scholars use encyclopaedias in a more sophisticated way.For instance, if I want to know whether it was possible or not that Napoleon met Kant, I have to pick up thevolume K and the volume N of my encyclopaedia: I discover that Napoleon was born in 1769 and died in 1821,Kant was born in 1724 and died in 1804, when Napoleon was already emperor. It is therefore not impossible thatthe two met. In order to confirm this I would probably need to consult a biography of Kant, or of Napoleon,but in a short biography of Napoleon, who met so many persons in his life, a possible meeting with Kant can bedisregarded, while in a biography of Kant a meeting with Napoleon would be recorded. In brief, I must leafthrough many books on many shelves of my library; I must take notes in order to compare later all the data Ihave collected. All this will cost me painful physical labour.

Yet, with hypertext instead I can navigate through the whole net-cyclopaedia. I can connect an eventregistered at the beginning with a series of similar events disseminated throughout the text; I can comparethe beginning with the end; I can ask for a list of all words beginning by A; I can ask for all the cases inwhich the name of Napoleon is linked with the one of Kant; I can compare the dates of their births and deaths-- in short, I can do my job in a few seconds or a few minutes.

Hypertexts will certainly render encyclopaedias and handbooks obsolete. Yesterday, it was possible to havea whole encyclopaedia on a CD-ROM; today, it is possible to have it on line with the advantage that thispermits cross references and the non-linear retrieval of information. All the compact disks, plus thecomputer, will occupy one fifth of the space occupied by a printed encyclopaedia. A printed encyclopaediacannot be easily transported as a CD-ROM can, and a printed encyclopaedia cannot be easily updated. Theshelves today occupied at my home as well as in public libraries by metres and metres of encyclopaedias couldbe eliminated in the near future, and there will be no reason to complain at their disappearance. Let usremember that for a lot of people a multivolume encyclopaedia is an impossible dream, not, or not only,because of the cost of the volumes, but because of the cost of the wall where the volumes are shelved.Personally, having started my scholarly activity as a medievalist I would like to have at home the 221 volumesof Migne's Patrologia Latina. This is very expensive, but I could afford it. What I cannot afford is anew apartment in which to store 221 huge books without being obliged to eliminate at least 500 other normaltomes.

Yet, can a hypertextual disk or the WWW replace books to be read? Once again we have to decide whether thequestion concerns books as physical or as virtual objects. Once again let us consider the physical problemfirst.

Good news: books will remain indispensable, not only for literature but for any circumstances in which oneneeds to read carefully, not only in order to receive information but also to speculate and to reflect aboutit. To read a computer screen is not the same as to read a book. Think about the process of learning a newcomputer programme. Usually, the programme is able to display on the screen all the instructions you need. Butusually users who want to learn the programme either print the instructions and read them as if they were inbook form, or they buy a printed manual. It is possible to conceive of a visual programme that explains verywell how to print and bind a book, but in order to get instructions on how to write, or how to use, a computerprogramme, we need a printed handbook.

After having spent 12 hours at a computer console, my eyes are like two tennis balls, and I feel the needof sitting down comfortably in an armchair and reading a newspaper, or maybe a good poem. Therefore, I thinkthat computers are diffusing a new form of literacy, but they are incapable of satisfying all the intellectualneeds they are stimulating. Please remember that both the Hebrew and the early Arab civilisations were basedupon a book and this is not independent of the fact that they were both nomadic civilisations. The AncientEgyptians could carve their records on stone obelisks: Moses and Muhammad could not. If you want to cross theRed Sea, or to go from the Arabian peninsula to Spain, a scroll is a more practical instrument for recordingand transporting the Bible or the Koran than is an obelisk. This is why these two civilisationsbased upon a book privileged writing over images. But books also have another advantage in respect tocomputers. Even if printed on modern acid paper, which lasts only 70 years or so, they are more durable thanmagnetic supports. Moreover, they do not suffer from power shortages and black-outs, and they are moreresistant to shocks.