The whither and why of books
Here’s a tweet summing up a recent Harvard conference: “Will the Internet age kill the printed book? LOL.” Sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the “Why Books?” conference drew more than 500 attendees on Oct. 29. By late morning, hundreds of their posts had lit up the Twitter airwaves. Conference scholars seemed to reach consensus that traditional books will survive and merge with digital technologies to meet a common goal: to store, retrieve, and circulate words and images. “Old books and e-books do not represent opposites,” said Robert Darnton, a scholar of French history and director of the University Library at Harvard. “They are more complementary than contradictory objects.” The speakers also suggested that books will endure by providing qualities a computer screen cannot. They can be owned and shared, and they have a material amplitude that invites sensory experience. Elizabeth Long, a Rice University sociologist who studies reading, praised books for...