Bernhard Fabian:
 
 

The archetypal battle of the books, as you will remember from Jonathan Swift's satire, was fought in St. James's Library in London on a Friday towards the end of the seventeenth century. It originated from a request by the moderns that the ancients should evacuate the higher of the two peaks of Parnassus which they had traditionally occupied. The ensuing contest was conducted with great spirit, with Homer, Pindar, Aristotle and Plato fighting on one side, and Milton, Dryden, Descartes, and Hobbes on the other. On the whole, the ancients had the advantage, but a parley ensued at which an armistice was negotiated. The report of the battle, as we have it from the pen of Swift, leaves the issue undecided.

Three hundred years later, another battle of the books is being fought, and in one way or another we all appear to be involved. Once more, those who consider themselves as moderns challenge those whom they regard as ancients, and request that the ancients retreat from a position which they have traditionally occupied and assumed to be their hereditary property. However, the new encounter is not, as the original contest was, a battle of authors and ideas fought with the same weapons.

The new battle is different. It is an attack on the book itself. It is not that books fight against books. The book as such is embattled by other "media", calling themselves "new" media. The book has become, as a French phrase elegantly puts it, "le livre concurencé", a medium radically contested. The book is called into question; it is besieged and beleaguered. The outcome of the new battle is, as that of its predecessor, as yet undecided. It appears to be unpredictable, at least at the moment.

The battle is not, as the earlier battle was, about the contents of books; is is not about the way texts are, or can be, understood or misunderstood. It is about the ways and means, or the possible ways and means, of producing, storing, distributing and handling texts. It is, basically, a battle of technologies, a battle between a long established technology (if we agree that printing and producing books is a technological process) and a novel technology, which has fairly recently been invented.

The conflict between the new moderns and the new ancients cannot be described as one between progress and backwardness. The new media are not more "advanced" than the book, though they are frequently presented as superior to the book. There is no evolutionary process which has led from the book to something better or more highly developed and therefore instantly desirable. The battle is a clash between two apparently closed and self-contained worlds. The world to which the book belongs (or is felt to belong, positively or negatively) is a material world of tangible objects and mechanical contrivances. Its symbol is the printing press. The world of the "new" media, with the computer as its symbol, is an apparently immaterial world - regardless of what is called its "hardware". It is a world in which texts are not inevitably "there" but one in which they are elusive and strangely invisible, unless we employ a complicated apparatus to bring them before our eyes.

There appears to be no common territory on which the "printed" text and the "electronic" text could, and would, accord with one another, though - strangely enough - recent technology enables us to convert, rather quickly and without great effort, an electronic text into a printed text and vice versa.

Small wonder that the contest between the ancients and the moderns is - once more - conducted with great spirit. The arguments advanced on either side are not confined to the technological problems which obviously need to be discussed first. They focus on the wider cultural and political implications which a victory of the moderns might presumably have for a society whose culture is essentially text-based and text-centered. That rational inquiry is frequently replaced by ideological rhetoric will come a surprise only to those who do not remember the grandiloquent gestures which accompanied the proclamations of the paperless society some thirty years ago.
 
 

The book has been with us for a long, long time. The beginnings of the codex (which replaced the scroll and the volume) date back to the first century AD. Though in its early stages the codex consisted only of a few folded sheets of papyrus or parchment and the book, as we know it, emerged only much later, it seems safe to say that pages have been read and turned over for nearly two thousand years.

The manuscript book and, later, the printed book has for the better part of a millenium been the primary medium for storing texts and the major vehicle for written communication. Thus the book may be said to contain the essence of our culture. In a famous thought experiment Karl Popper explained that after the destruction of all our machines and tools and after the loss of all our subjective learning our civilization could and would re-emerge, if only "libraries and our capacity to learn from them" had survived. ⁽¹⁾

In addition to being a carrier of information, the book has been a source of pleasure for those who seek entertainment by reading tales of wonder and adventure, stories of travels and exploration or narratives of imaginary lives and loves. When, late in the eighteenth century, novel reading became a popular pastime the pleasures of the book appeared to be so dangerous that they were branded as a source of moral corruption. In his Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht Immanuel Kant warned of the ill effects of books which are now counted among our classical novels.⁽²⁾ Not only did the book instruct the reader; it appeared to have the power of transporting him or her to other times and other places or of immersing him or her into other worlds.

Some years ago, the well-known comic periodical Punch, or the LondonCharivari suprised its readers with a piece of news announcing the re-invention of the book in an electronic environment:⁽³⁾
 

A new aid to rapid - almost magical - learning has made its appearance. Indications are that if it catches on all the electronic gadgets will be so much junk. The new device is known as Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge. The makers call it by its initials, BOOK. Many advantages are claimed over the old-style learning and teaching aids on which most people are brought up nowadays. It has no wires, no electric circuit to break down...It is made entirely without mechanical parts to go wrong or need replacment. ...How does this revolutionary, unbelievably easy invention work? Basically BOOK consists only of a large number of paper sheets. These may run to hundreds where BOOK covers a lenthy programm of information. Each sheet bears a number in sequence so that the sheets cannot be used in the wrong order. To make it even easier for the user to keep the sheets in proper order they are held firmly in place by a special locking device called a 'binding'. Each sheet of paper presents the user with an information sequence in the form of symbols, which he absorbs optically for automatic registration on the brain. ...BOOK may be taken up at any time and used by merely opening it. Instantly it is ready for use....Altogether the Built-in Oderly Organized Knowledge seems to have great advantages with no drawbacks. We predict a great future for it.

This is, flippantly told, the success story of the book, and there is little to add to it.

But there is another story, which runs parallel to the success story, at least for the past three hundred years. This is the story of the dissatisfaction with the book, a story of limitations and deficiencies, of makeshifts and replacements. It is a story of the discontent with the book itself, with the circumstances attending its production and distribution and, finally, with the lack of control over what we have come to call the printed tradition.

The story begins in the latter half of the seventeenth century when the early scientists tried to communicate the results of their researches to fellow scientists and to the public at large. It was then that, in the wake of Francis Bacon's philosophy, science was first conceived of as an on-going process of discovery. Something novel came to light; it had to be made known and added to an existing and continually growing stock of knowledge. In this situation, a new need for continuous communication arose which had not made itself felt before.

The traditional book continued to serve the seventeenth-century scientists, and it served them well, as some of the science classics prove. At the same time, another medium of communication had to be created or, more precisely, derived from the book. This was the periodical - a publication which appeared at stated intervals and to which contributions could be made as they occured. It functioned, as it were, as a receptacle for what happened to be produced in the way of new knowledge. Periodicals could be published as year-books or, at shorter intervals, in quarterly, monthly or weekly issues. In the end these individual issues were again bound as a book. As books, however, they were distinguished not by their subject but by the chronological order in which they appeared.

The point to be made is that the book performs certain functions extremely well but that it is not an all-purpose medium. The distinction which we habitually make between books and periodicals is a valid distinction - in spite of their technical identity. The periodical satifies a demand for accelerated communication and for miscellaneous publication which the book in its traditional form is apparently not, or not always, suited to meet. The present complaint about the book as a "slow" medium is nothing new; it is more than three hundred years old.

With the increased scholarly and proto-scientific activity in the later seventeenth century another need made itself felt. Ideas, discoveries and observations, which accumulated in large quantities, had to be recorded and kept in order for future reference. Until then, an essentially stable corpus of knowledge had been passed on - a process symbolically represented by the copyist of the age of the manuscript book. The copyist simply transferred texts from one book to another. The new scholar or scientist gathered material. To commit facts and figures of divers origin to a note-book results in chaos, as we all know, unless an elaborate indexing system is devised. The note-book is simply not suited for storing large amounts of miscellaneous information.

The solution to the problem was presented by Vincentius Placcius, a polyhistor in Hamburg. In 1689 Placcius published a treatise called De arte excerpendi: Vom gelahrten Buchhalten liber singularis. Placcius recommended the use of "schedae excerptorum", single sheets which today would be called index-cards or file-cards. These "schedae" Placcius regarded as "chartae non compactae sed solutae." In other words, the index-file was the result of a process of dissolution; it came into being when the book was "disbound". The annihilation of the book created a new tool which, since then, countless generations of scholars have made use of. Placcius went one step further. As a storing device for his "schedae excerptorum" he recommended a filing cabinet. If our information is correct, the first of these cabinets was built in Hannover and later acquired by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. ⁽⁴⁾

In the eighteenth century there appears to have been a growing suspicion that the book as a carrier of information was not an unmixed blessing. It could prove a burden, physically and, perhaps, intellectually. The voluminous codex with its massive quantities of text came under attack. One of the early opponents was Joseph Addison, the inventor of the periodical essay. Addison quoted Kallimachos, the legendary librarian of Alexandria: "A great book is a great evil" (mega biblion, mega kakon). Kallimachos, we must remember, still handled scrolls, and big scrolls may indeed have proved "great evils". Addison, however, advocated a new literary form commensurate to new habits of reading. The essay, he proclaimed, was a condensed text which contained the essential information in a nutshell.⁽⁵⁾ Later in the century, Louis-Sébastain Mercier in his utopian story L'an 2440 encountered, instead of a large library, one small cabinet of books and was told by the librarian: "Wise men extracted the substance from a thousand in-folio volumes, all of which they transferred into a small duodecime-sized volume.... We have abridged what seemed of most importance."⁽⁶⁾

The eighteenth-century transformations in the book-world were considerable. The big book did not disappear, and is still with us. But the small, quintessential book was henceforth recognized as a superior intellectual achievement. The large book continued to be produced; but the octavo and duodecimo formats became standard. Paperbacks made their appearence, and for new generations of readers pocket-sized books became sought-after objets nomades (to use a smart present-day phrase⁽⁷⁾) . The arrangement of books by subject was not abolished (the classification schemes in some of the world's great libraries date from the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries); but the Leipzig Fair Catalogues, presenting semi-annually new books to the scholarly and general reader, resorted to a single alphabetical listing. Countless collections, selections, abridgements and extracts appeared and disclosed the plight of the reader faced with an abundance of books.

The burden of the book increased throughout the nineteenth century. The so-called information explosion of the twentieth century has its counterpart in the nineteenth. In fact, there has been a continous growth of the book production since the eighteen-thirties in accordance with the law of acceleration and multiplying complexity which Henry Adams formulated in his famous Education. That specialization had gone to extremes is a complaint made by Jakob Burckhardt as early as 1868.⁽⁸⁾

That the periodical had taken priority over the monograph was observed by Theodor Mommsen as early as 1874.⁽⁹⁾ The avalanche of print moving rapidly toward the twentieth century is best retraced in the nineteenth-century holdings of medium-sized libraries.

The real problem was not the increase in the number of books and periodicals but the lack of effective bibliographical control. There were of course bibliographies, mainly tools for the trade, which documented the current book production. The weak spot in the system were the libraries. All major libraries, and many minor ones, began to expand rapidly around the middle of the ninetenth century. The new magisterial buildings in London, Paris, Washington and (delayed by decades) in Berlin speak their own language. The pace of acquisition was extraordinary. The process of cataloguing, however, was slow, frequently inefficient and eventually inadequate to the complexities of the material on the one hand, and to the requirements of the user on the other.

The deficiency was due to want of proper technology. All of the early catalogues were in book form. These catalogues persisted until fairly recently, witness the General Catalogue of the British Library with its pasted-in entries. Some of these catalogues are historically invaluable as, for instance, the Göttingen subject-catalogue. The limitations of this type of catalogue need not be specified. The next step was the sheet catalogue, consisting of single sheets held together by a ribbon. The sheet-catalogue of the Bavarian State Library was in use until the nineteen-eighties. Then came the card catalogue with standardised cards, first hand-written, and from the later nineteenth century onwards typewritten. The transition from one type of catalogue to another usually implied the complete re-writing of the existing catalogue - a herculean task which many libraries were incapable of performing adequately for lack of resources.

With the advent of the machine-readable catalogue in the nineteen-sixties and seventies it became possible, for the first time in the history of the book, to exert bibliographical control over the printed tradition as a whole. The control over new publications is now nearly complete. With the introduction of cataloguing-in-publication, that is to say of cataloguing in advance of publication, cataloguing has even reached a degree of virtuality which appears to be in perfect accordance with other computer-generated cyber worlds. Cataloguing is no longer behind the production of a book; it even precedes its production. The problem today is to get hold of the book. The great question is whether retrospective cataloguing will be undertaken to the extent that the printed tradition becomes as easily accessible as the current production of books. It is a question of the highest cultural importance - one which transcends the present-day querelle des anciens et des moderns.
 
 

In 1944, shortly before the end of World War II, the American librarian Fremont Rider diclosed the law of the exponential growth of literature.⁽¹⁰⁾ Since the 1830s the stock of smaller libraries had doubled every sixteen years, that of the leading research libraries every nine years. If this continued, Rider predicted, libraries would become unmanageable. There were too many books, and the book appeared to be too unwieldy to be serviceable in the future.

Rider recommended the miniaturisation of the book. The contents of each book should be printed in microform on the back of the catalogue card. In the 1950s and 1960s the idea of microprint indeed caught on. Reference works were published in microprint; notably, the 260-odd volumes of the General Catalogue of the British Library were reduced to less than thirty. Subsequently, so-called research collections made their appearance. They were printed on opaque cards, stored in boxes, and accompanied by reading machines. The microprint book is still a niche product. The collections were a flop; most of them rot away in libraries.

Almost simultaneously Vanevar Bush, the post-war science advisor to President Roosevelt, projected - in a famous article in the AtlanticMonthly⁽¹¹⁾ -- a desk-size gadget called "Memex". This was to combine microtexts with a searching device to enable the individual scholar to have at hand his personal research library. "Memex" would solve all problems of storage, access and retrieval but, as a kind of super-computer, unfortunately remained a vision beyond the technological possibilities of the time.

Next came microfiche, a German invention of the 1940s.⁽¹²⁾ Conceived of in analogy to the shellac record which stored sound, it was intended to reduce books and other graphic material to easily manageable standard-size sheets. It was the first successful attempt at miniaturisng the book. Microfiche has lasted, though it has lost much of its former attraction as a solution to the problems posed by the book. Ultra-microfiche, storing up to 3000 pages on a postcard-size film, made its appearance in the 1970s but has since disappeared without leaving a trace. Huge research collections on microfiche or on microfilm (the latter a step back from the sheet and the page and therefore from the codex) seemed to herald the age of the micro-library. But, once more, these collections have failed to attract as many readers as they were expected to win.

It is against this background that the electronic text must be seen. In simple terms, it is a radical innovation. It has changed much, and may, or will, change everything - or almost everything - in the world of the book and, by implication, in the worlds of knowledge and information. Will it indeed? It has already altered the habits of the vast majority of authors and modified their mode of composition. It is likely to affect our ways of dealing with texts since, in electronic form, texts suddenly assume a degree of fluidity and flexibility hitherto unknown. The electronic text seems to promise the end of our discontent with the book. With the help of a gadget not heavier than a full-size book all texts, so at least the moderns hope, will freely flow from one corner of the globe to the other at an unimaginable speed. Sleek servers are expected by the moderns to replace huge libraries housing millions of books.

However, the first consequence of the introduction of the computer appears to be a proliferation of printed books. The electronic text has led to revolutionary changes in the production of the book. By the elimination of traditional type-setting book production has been considerably speeded up and become much more flexible. More books are being produced but editions can now be smaller, much smaller than they used to be. Short-run publishing has become economically feasible, and the latest achievement in book production is on-demand publishing - the printing of a small number of copies, or even single copies, from an electronically stored copy-text. The book (and, even more so, the periodical) has adapted itself to a situation which is the result of progressive specialization. Ever more books are being produced in ever-smaller editions for ever-smaller groups of readers.

But we must not be deceived. With the advent of electronic text a truly new system for distributing texts has come into existence. In the past, microtext publication of whatever kind consisted in the re-publication of an existing book in secondary form. Now there is a genuine choice available. If produced and stored electronically, texts intended for circulation can be either transmitted electronically or printed conventionally. To be stored the electronic text requires a minimum of physical space. Provided the indispensable hardware does not break down, the electronic text can almost instantly be transmitted or distributed. In other words, it would appear to be the ideal solution of all problems caused by the book as a carrier of information. And we are indeed told time and again that the future, if not exactly paperless, will at least be bookless.

A closer look at the new system reveals even more advantages in addition to easy storage and equally easy transmission. Electronic texts can readily be combined with other electronically storable material - images and sound. The resulting multimedia complex can be made available on-line (in the Internet) or off-line (on CD-ROM). CD-ROM offers storage facilities which go far beyond the capacities of print and film. And the Internet, we are told, can be expanded almost indefinitely, so that it will eventually offer potentially unlimited storage facilities for everything which can be digitized.

Though the new system appears to have emerged all of a sudden, it did not come into existence spontanenously. As a "cooperatively run global collection of computer networks" the Internet has a history, which - as is well known - goes back to the time of the Cold War. The Internet derived from a project to develop a military research network. It was not originally designed as an "Information SuperHighway", nor was it intended to be an alternative to the book or, more broadly, to printing as a means of communication. It was gradually adapted to new uses. And it was step by step discovered as a new technology which appeared to satisfy an increasingly felt demand for a new channel (or new channels) of communication.

Ortega y Gasset, generally recognized as the most perceptive observer of mass phenomena in the twentieth century, discerned as early as 1935 the need for regulating the rising tide of information. In an address to the International Library Congress in Madrid, entitled Misión del bibliotecario, he presented his solution: The librarian should act not only as an administrator of the printed tradition but also as a controller of the book, as someome whose primary task it was to filter the flood of print. In retrospect, this may appear a utopian suggestion. No librarian has ever had the power or the courage to function as a filter between the book and the reader, and cannot reasonably be expected to act in this way. But Ortega y Gasset brilliantly identified the problem: the need of sorting out superfluous texts, and of abandoning, even destroying, them as a measure of mental hygiene. What he envisaged was a two-tier system of communication which would separate what is ephemeral, transitory and short-lived from what is (or ought to be) permanent, enduring, and long-lasting.

It is from this point of view that the electronic text presents itself in its novelty and also in its potential usefulness. The introduction electronic communication can, and perhaps must, be seen as a relief operation. It takes away a burden from the book which the book, as we know it, was not intended to carry. It facilitates the flow and exhange of the type of information which is instantly required but need not be kept permanently. It allows us to distinguish between texts intended for current use and texts to be kept for future use. or distant future.

There is no need here to describe the Internet in detail, and to specify the contortions and perversions of it. Nor do I wish to celebrate the so-called democratic qualities of a medium which can be used and abused by anybody. The primary function of the Internet appears to that of a news medium. It transmits pieces of information which are, as a rule, unrelated to each other. Historically, the fragmentation of information and the desire to transmit or distribute such fragments as they became available began with the newspaper and the periodical. What counted was speed of transfer and delivery. The process was continually accelerated, and the decisive step to instant comunication was introduction of the telegraph and the telephone, the forerunners of E-mail.

In every-day terms, the primary function of the Internet is that of a global bulletin-board for communicating or advertising practically everything and, increasingly, a virtual market for selling and buying. It also serves as an exchange medium for newsgroups of any description, and as an information source for all sorts of requirements. It may ultimately play a significant role in education and instruction. I need not enlarge on this.

From the scholarly point of view, the chief use of the Internet (apart from providing a forum for the exchange such miscellaneous information as has for centuries been committed to private or circular letters) is that of an outlet for the publication of the results of research. Sometimes these are final, more often they are tentative and preliminary, submitted at random for inspection and comment. Hailed as one of the historic improvements in scholarly communication, the Internet is recommended as a potentially vast publishing medium. It is (or should be) available to all scholars and researchers as a self-service instrument for communicating with both small circles of fellow workers and the world of scholarship at large.

There can be no question about the suitability of electronic publication for material of limited life expectancy. Nearly all scientific and medical periodicals are characterized by a high incidence of real or apparent obsolescence (the well-known half-life of periodicals). These are increasingly being distributed either as electronic texts or both as electronic and printed texts. For periodicals in the social sciences and the humanities a similar form of publication is envisaged by editors and publishers. Whether or not electronic publication is in fact economically the most feasible or desirable manner of distribution is still an open question, and is likely to remain so for some time.

In any case, the two tier system with its distinction between a temporary and a permanent form of publication has taken shape and will before long be fully established. Its raison d'être is the easy manipulability of the electronic text. If necessary, such a text can be stored for a reasonably long period, though its up-keep may require more attention than that of a conventionally printed text. The text can also be erased by the push of a button, and its elimination from the system is less cumbersome and (for those brought up in the Gutenberg tradition) perhaps also less objectionable than the destruction of a printed text. Finally, an electronic text can easily be changed; it can be up-dated (to use the jargon term), and in the long run this may prove one of its major advantages. (Of course, the manipulability of the electronic text has many implications, and of some of them we have been aware ever since the appearence of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The realm of the electronic text has considerably expanded over the last decade or so, and it it likely to expand further. The much-debated "information age" is still to come, even if many may feel that they have already had enough of it. Most likely, we shall be flooded with "information"; most of it, if at all useful, will be of temporary relevance. Railway timetables and encyclopedias, recipe books and reference works will ultimately have to be consulted in electronic form; and many of these will be "enriched" by material which few, if any, will want.

As Ortega y Gasset predicted, "regulating" the flood of temporarily useful information is a vital necessity - in everyday life as in science and scholarship. Whether or not the new professional surfers in the Internet will be more helpful in the future than the librarians were in the past once more appears to be an open question. Unless regulatory mechanisms are introduced, and introduced quickly, we may all end up with a question which forces itself alread on an increasing number of searchers for information: Is it worth retrieving?

If I am not mistaken, many of the problems of electronic publication must be attributed to the fact that there is as yet no clear idea of what is it really about. Electronic publication cannot be placed in the tradition of printing and book-making; it is different from it. In my view, there is no electronic book in the proper sense of the word, nor is there an electronic journal. There are electronically stored texts of various lengths and formats, and these will require a taxonomy of their own.

Reading in an electronic environment is different from reading in a printed environment. All screens pose ergonomical problems. In the past, these have largely accounted for the acceptance or non-acceptance of microtexts. This must be taken into consideration when the future of the printed text is weighed against that of the electronic text. The codex with its turnable pages remains one of the miraculous inventions of almost mythical quality, comparable to the wheel. To simulate electronically the "turning of the page" is regarded as a major achievement of computer technology. The most recent invention is a device called the electronic book or e-book. The trendy version of the e-book consists of smallish portable screens bound in leather, which canbe opened like a book. It allows the user to "load down" an electronically stored texts, and to mark, annotate and search this text. What kind of "downloadable" text will be available remains to be seen. Perhaps the range of texts will include, as electronic bed-side reading, popular novels as a particularly short-lived mass product.
 
 

The library of the future will be a hybrid library. It will not be the traditional library, as we know it, but it will not be a library without books either, as some gurus of the electronic world would have it. What will it be like?

The potential of the electronic text has not yet been fully explored. The concept of the printed book is still so dominant that there are obvious difficulties in conceiving electronic alternatives to it. Many of the supposedly new features of the electronic text are less spectacular or revolutionary than they are assumed to be; others may prove more innovative than they would seem to be at first sight. Conversely, our long familiarity with the printed book conceals from our view its high standard as a carrier of information. From the table of contents to the index the book boasts devices which make information easily accessible. To take only one example: Hypertext links, which are presented as new aids to creative reading and thinking, have their counterpart the age-old cross references which for centuries have aided readers in their non-linear movements through printed texts.

One of the great assets of the electronic text is that as a guidance for the user so-called navigational tools can readily be attached to it. At the push of a button the reader can be directed to specific points in a textual continuum. Large collections of texts can be searched readily and reliably, provided the navigational tools are intellegently devised. This is a great advantage over film (either roll or sheet film). As a consequence, over the past decade or so masses of printed material have been digitised (each page as an image) and put together as research collections. The raison d'être for these corpusses, as they are generally called, is either the need for preservation or the convenience of the researcher. In the first case, there is indeed justification for reformatting parts of the printed tradition in view of the inevitable decay of books, predominantly of nineteenth-century books. In the second, the dominant motive is, once more, desire to miniaturise the book. Librarians of the modernist persuasion feel that modern readers should should be enabled to move through their texts in one medium, and in one medium only - the electronic. The so-called English Corpus, to give but one example, comprises 200.000 poems, 4000 dramatic works (1280-1900) and 500 novels (1500-1900).⁽¹³⁾

Archives of this kind will become standard equipment in our libraries. Whether or not they will sooner or later replace the collections of books which have been accumulated over centuries is likely to remain an open question for the foreseeable future. In the past, ready-made research collections, however attractively packaged, have not been entirely successful. In addition, there is an increasing resistance on the part of bibliographers and research scholars to unnessary reformatting.⁽¹⁴⁾ The process may indeed impair the integrity of the text. In all processes involving the reproduction of texts the authenticity of the text cannot be guaranteed The reproduction of a reproduction (as in the case of image scanning from a microfilm) is particularly dangerous. The objections are not on a purely technical level. They have general cultural implications. Are we moving away from an authentically documented culture to a culture of replicas? The question can and must be asked. It is likely to become an urgent question in the near future.

If an electronic text is keyboarded, it it searchable word by word, even letter by letter. This allows an accurate analysis of a single text and, still more important, of a corpus of texts which goes far beyond the the analytical modes and methods hitherto available. As databases, such texts have been prepared of the œuvre of some major authors, among them Goethe and Shakespeare. They will eventually become available as electronic editions of standard authors, and will serve a variety of purposes in the scholarly investigation of texts. They will not only be helpful: they will open up new lines of enquiry for textual editors, literary critics and others. Definitive editions of major writers are already being planned on a dual basis as printed reading editions and as electronic working editions.

It is here that the electronic text really comes into its own. A keyboarded text can be regarded as a textual stratum which, by virtue of its connectability, can be linked either to other texts or to other forms of the same text (e.g. other editions, manuscripts etc). The result is a multi-layered textual complex. In the technical sense this may be a database but from the intellectual point of view it is an innovative construction for which a suitable name will have to be found. Textual complexes of this or a similar type are not likely to change our reading habits (scholars have always combined linear reading with various kinds of criss-cross reading) but they will influence and possibly alter our ways of handling and controlling texts. The name "pyramidal book" has been suggested for a text which is expanded, enhanced and enriched by underlying strata of complementary or explanatory texts.⁽¹⁵⁾ It conveys something of the novel character of these constructs but it may not be inclusive enough.

Finally, the traditional book. What will be its future rôle? It is no longer the exclusive medium which it was for a long time after the introduction of printing. It appears to be beleagered, surrounded by alternatives which seem to offer, both now and for a more distant future, superior solutions to the problems of storing and communicating information. Will the book be totally replaced by something else?

By suggesting that the library of the future will be a hybrid library I have implied that the book will not disappear and that it has a future. It even appears to have a secure future. One of the leading American librarians, the former director of the Harvard library system, believes that the book will be with us "for a long, long time". This view is shared by many others, and there appear to be at least three reasons to support it.

The first is economical. What we have come to call the printed tradition consists of billions of books preserved in innumerable libraries all over the world. Though the prophets of the paperless society predict that before long there will be enough storage capacity for digitizing our printed heritage en bloc, this kind of gigantic retro-converion is likely to remain a dream of the cyberworld. Reformatting is time-consuming and expensive, the results are not entirely satisfactory, and secondary forms have a limited life-expectancy. Inevitably, brittle books will have to be saved through reformatting. But large parts of the printed tradition have lasted for centuries and will last for a long time to come.

The crucial question is whether or not we are prepared to preserve the printed tradition in its integrity. The last two decades or so have not only seen the rapid development of the new information technology; they have also been a period in which the social rôle of the book and of the printed tradition have been reaffirmed. National libraries have been built or rebuilt on a grand scale, and these libraries have been conspicuously placed, physically and symbolically. The book production of entire centuries has been recatalogued to present-day standards, and various preservation activities have been initiated to safeguard books as books. There is a new awareness that book collections large and small are cultural artefacts in their own right and that the printed tradition constitutes, both physically and intellectually, a continuum which ought to be kept in order for our own benefit. After all, tradition leads on to the future. We are here faced with a fundamental question of the politics of culture.

The second reason is an anthropological one; it is not at all spectacular but of major importance. It has to do with the incompatability between the human eye and the screen. Reading as an activity has been intensively studied in recent years, often with surprizing results. Physiological inquiries have not produced new insights. They have merely confirmed a common experience, namely that reading a long text on a screen is a perfect strain. There is no need to go into details. I have not yet met a person who has voluntarily read a book on a screen. The number of avantgarde readers who have acquired an e-book is said to be unexpectedly small.

For the historian of the book, the screen has a technical disadvantage in addition to its ergonomic shortcomings. The screen does not present a formatted text to the eye, as the book does on its pages. Of course, a page can be reproduced photographically to appear on a screen. But from the reader's point of view, the genunine electronic text is an inferior text. It is a text which has to be moved to come before the eye, and what the screen offers is never the equivalent of a page. The technical term for moving the computer-generated text is "to scroll". Historically, the scroll was the antecendent of the codex as a carrier of information.

The screen, in particular the computer screen, must be regarded as a device for the presentation of texts which need to be consulted, that is to say short texts. It is unsuitable for texts which require continuous reading. One of the technical questions of far-reaching intellectual consequences is whether the screen will be adjusted to the format of the page, or the text will be adjusted to the format of the screen. In the first case, the result will a orderly organisation of our texts; in the second, we shall end up with text clips resembling the well-known video clips. The difference between the page and the screen may in the long run affect our intellectual habits and procedures.

The third reason has to do with the traditional function of the book. The book has been our primary medium of information, and to a large extent it still is. This is, inter alia, suggested by a vast number of new reference books; many of them have reached a typographical perfection which surpasses even the most stylish presentations on the screen. But there can be no doubt that for reasons which I have specified the book will not remain the dominant vehicle of information.

In the future the book will be one medium among others. As a consequence, the book will be divested of functions which we have thought to be of its essence. This may reduce the number of books, and this may prove a welcome side-effect. It will not be the end of the book. On the contrary, the book - freed of burdens which it was not meant or suited to carry - appears to be due for a revival or a renaissance as our major source of knowledge.

The singular strength of the book is that it is the medium for the presentation of a continuous, even complex text in an orderly, finite sequence. It is the vehicle for transporting arguments. I am aware of the fact that what could be called the traditional discourse is now frequently regarded as an outmoded intellectual manner of proceeding. Nevertheless, we live on organized knowledge, as our predecessors have. In the kaleidoscopic world of fragmented information the need for direction and orientation inevitably increases, and with it the demand for a medium in which the processes of ordering experience find public expresssion. This is what makes the book indispensable.

One of the great legacies which the eighteenth century has left us is the recognition that the particular way in which an author produces or expresses or presents concepts constitutes the very nature of literary (or, for that matter, intellectual) creation. It is the formation (or, in present-day jargon, the design) of the argument which makes the autonomous author. This concept of authorship has been cherished ever since, and it appears to be as valid today as it was in pre-electronic times. It is the ordering power, the ability to create a meaningful pattern, which is the hallmark of the author.

I am convinced that - appearances to the contrary notwithstanding - the autonomous author will finally preserve the book - in whatever form. The book is the visible manifestation of his creative power. It is the result of the measured consideration of a subject (however large or small). It is the medium through which the reader can be reached most directly and most effectively. This is what even the gurus of the the electronic world realize. All prophecies proclaiming the end of the printed word and the disappearance of book are, strangely enough, published in book form.

The book, it has been said, "is a slow form of exchange. It is a mode of temporality which conceives of public communication not as action, but rather as reflection upon action. Indeed, the book form serves precisely to defer action, to widen the temporal gap between though and deed, to create a space for reflection and debate."⁽¹⁶⁾ In other words, the book is the proper medium for creating distance. And is not distance what we need - to make sense of what is around us? The preservation of the book, then, may turn out to be a cultural necessity as well as a cultural accomplishment.
 

© 1999
 

1. "Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject", in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford, edition of 1975), pp. 107-108.

2. Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, § 47.

3. R. J. Heathorn, "Learn with Book", reprinted in The Future of the Printed Word, ed. Philip Hills (London, 1980), pp. 171-172.

4. See Bernhard Fabian, Der Gelehrte als Leser (Hildesheim, Zürich, New York, 1998), pp. 23 ff.

5. See The Spectator no. 124.

6. Quoted from Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1994), p. 69.

7. Jacques Attali, Lignes d'horizon (Paris, 1990), pp. 131f.

8. Jakob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, ed. Jacob Oeri (München, 1978), p. 12.

9. Theodor Mommsen, Reden und Aufsätze (Berlin, 1905; reprint Hildesheim,1976), p. 43.

10. Fremont Rider, The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library: A Problem and Iis Solution (New York, 1944).

11. Vanevar Bush, "As We May Think", Atlantic Monthly, 176 (1945).

12. See Josepf Goebel, Schrift. Letter, Mikrokopie (Mainz, 1940).

13. The English corpus, published by Chadwyck-Healey, Cambridge.

14. See G. Thomas Tanselle, Literature and Artifacts (Charlottesville, 1998).

15. See Robert Darnton, "The New Age of the Book", New York Review of Books, 18 March 1999.

16. Carla Hesse, "Books in Time", in The Future of the Book, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996), p. 27.