The Persistent Fetish (1): Whither the Book?

Posted on | June 15, 2008 | 3 Comments

The book, as we have known and loved it for half a millennium and more, is an object of veneration for many. I am most definitely a bibliophile, and while I can usually be sure that it is the content of a book, or the promise of the title or author, or a recommendation, that leads me to buy it and read it, I am equally sure that the nature of the object itself plays a huge part in my love of books. The book – printed, bound, tactile, replete with promise – is fetishized like no other object in existence, I believe.

And rightly so, since it is the book that powered the Enlightenment, that gave us our universities, that enabled mass education and that propelled large parts of our world towards the many and varied attempts at democracy. Equally, of course, it is that same fetishization of the book that has played its part through the ages in sustaining so many variations on irrationality. We see this in the veneration of certain books as, somehow, the word of one or another of the many ‘one true’ gods that mankind has felt the need to invent across time and place. The book allows us to read and ponder the words of Plato or Popper, Austen or Amis, Hegel or Hemingway – but it also allows those who would persuade us of their righteousness to pass off the words of mere mortals as sacred or immutable, and indeed the physical book containing those words as itself somehow hallowed.

So the book is both a powerful medium for the capture and transfer of knowledge, ideas and sentiments, and yet also a potent artefact in its own right, as an object in some sense distinct from the content within its bindings. From a cultural and educational perspective it is, of course, the content of books that is important. The expression of ideas, thoughts, experience, human dilemmas and conjecture in the words on the page, the encapsulation of knowledge in text and image: it is these that have contributed, and continue to contribute, in so many different ways to the development of humankind. For all our fetishization of the book as an object, it is the elementary role of the book as a repository of knowledge, ideas and imagination that remains the critical ingredient of the form in its contribution to humanity’s search for enlightenment, validation and pleasure.

In this increasingly digitized age, however, the limitations of the book are becoming more and more obvious to everyone except those who really cannot get past the fetish, who are unable or unwilling to imagine that the book as we know it can be bettered, and that the ‘book as knowledge’ cannot ever be separated from the ‘book as object’ without doing damage to our culture. The fetish undoubtedly exists – I should know, I’m a sufferer – and my guess is that even when the multiple and obvious benefits of e-books become generally recognised, when eventually the electronic medium for reading e-books is just as tactile and flexible in its own way as a paper book, and when the longstanding promise of universal hypertext really becomes attainable, there will still be voices off telling us we are heading for hell in a handcart because we have spurned the book in its traditional form.

Despite my fetishistic leanings towards the book as an object, I just do not accept this portent of doom. The creative potential of digital books when they are just as portable and readable as a ‘real’ book will quickly negate the latter’s sheer persistence and longevity. In education, the digital book, alongside the expanding range of social technologies, will play its part in the shift from the mass education of the industrial area to ‘Learning 2.0′ in the digital era.

But all of this is not to say that the ‘real’ book will not survive – of course it will, for a very very long time to come – but I do not think it will be long before the e-book simply becomes the book, and the definition of book will embrace both the traditional and the digital form.

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Category: books, content, creativity, democracy, education, enlightenment, epistemology, knowledge, literature, religion, society, technology

Comments

3 Responses to “The Persistent Fetish (1): Whither the Book?”

Judy O'Connell
June 19th, 2008 @ 5:17 am

I have to say I agree with you whole-heartedly! That we haven’t quite got the technology here yet is not to say that we haven’t see the beta models of what future flexible pocket readers will look like. With the same portabiliy, albeit lighter and more flexible, the book is here to stay – it just won’t be the paperbased products we are accoustomed to. I for one will welcome lighter versions of some of my favourite hefty tomes!
Hilery
June 19th, 2008 @ 9:15 am

Whatever one feels about the demise of the traditional source of such pleasure, wisdom and tactile comfort, it is clear that the arrival of new forms of purverying knowledge, information and ideas will be of enormous benefit to people who don’t have a disposable income to spend happy hours and hefty sums in bookshops.
The advantages of online texts to people in developing countries are inestimable.
Angela Maiers Tests the Digital Publishing Waters : John Connell: The Blog
March 29th, 2009 @ 1:50 pm

[...] in the summer of last year, I wrote a couple of longish posts (first post; second post) about what I termed the ‘persistent fetish’ of the book. My basic [...]