One of the things that has struck me the most is the weird way in which conversations about e-books tend to rocket between two polar positions: "I love books and e-books are an abomination!" and "I love my e-book and print is dead!" Both seem ridiculous to me in their totalizing insistence--surely the rise of electronic books aren't going to fully eclipse books. Did radio wipe out television? Did cinema destroy theater? I don't even think that the codex eliminated the value of tablets and scrolls. So to imagine that the future is bookless seems silly.
Robert Darnton's recent conversation with Diane Rehm on her radio show exemplified this push-pull polarization. Despite his best efforts to make subtle these distinctions and to work with the sort of nuance that makes his scholarship so interesting, many of the host and caller comments kept coming back to this fear of the death of the book, as if it is impossible to love reading and to love books and to also embrace the possibilities of digitization. (If you haven't yet read Darnton's new book, you can access many of its constituent parts in their earlier versions via the handy list at Early Modern Online Bibliography. I should pause, too, to say that there are lost of good conversations happening at that blog about these concerns.)
For some other subtle thoughts about how book historians might respond to e-books and digitization, I highly recommend a bunch of Whitney's posts at diapsalmata: the first builds on my last post and encourages a material approach to the work of digitizing, subsequent posts think about why the future isn't here yet and the relationship between the digital and the archive.
Whitney's most recent post raises these questions again in light of the new Shakespeare Quartos Archive, something that I'll be looking at and blogging on soon. In the meantime, though, you might be wondering what a photograph of Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue is doing illustrating this post. Here's the answer: I am the proud new owner of all three volumes. Why would I shell out the big bucks for something that is now freely available online? Because even though it has been turned into an electronic database, the printed catalogue provides information that isn't carried over to the online one, and it can be used in ways that I sometimes find harder to navigate online. I wouldn't want to get rid of the ESTC by any stretch of the imagination. It's a great thing that it is now available to all and sundry. But it doesn't mean that we're throwing away our printed ones, either.
On that note, happy Thanksgiving to my American readers and happy reading to you all!
