Twenty-five years ago, in What Would Google Do?, I called for the book to be rethought and renovated, digital and connected, so that it could be updated and made searchable, conversational, collaborative, linkable, less expensive to produce, and cheaper to buy. The problem, I said, was that we so revered the book, it had become sacrosanct. “We need to get over books,” I wrote. “Only then can we reinvent them.”

I recant.

Umberto Eco was right when he said, “The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.” When exactly the modern book was invented is a matter of debate. Was it by Gutenberg? No. He mechanized the manuscript. Was it half a century later, at the end of books’ incunabular phase, with the addition of the title page, page numbers, paragraph indentations, and other characteristics of the book as we know it? I think not. That describes the form of the modern book, not its soul.

For me, the book became the book a century and a half after the opening of what I call the Gutenberg Parenthesis (a title borrowed from a theory by three Danish academics). That’s when print became a canvas for creation: of the modern novel with Cervantes, the essay with Montaigne, and alongside them the birth of the author and soon the Enlightenment. Since then, books have changed little, except for what each might contain and how each might be produced and sold. The book is the book. It is a space between covers to be tamed. Its finitude makes demands upon author and editor, who decide what fits, what is worth saying, and what they hope is worth discussing and preserving—though the reader is the one who will ultimately make those decisions, who finishes making the book.

The death of the book has been oft foretold. In Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo worried that the book would kill the cathedral. Now the worriers wonder what will kill the book. As Elizabeth Eisenstein, who founded the field of book history, told the Media Ecology Association in 2002, “The last two centuries have witnessed not a succession of deaths … but, rather, a sequence of premature obituaries.”

In 1994—the same year the first hyperlinked browser, Netscape, debuted—Sven Birkerts issued his sigh-filled j’accuse against the ebook, data, and the internet in The Gutenberg Elegies. “The formerly stable system—the axis with writer at one end, editor, publisher, and bookseller in the middle, and the reader at the other end—is slowly being bent into a pretzel,” he wrote, proclaiming that the internet would result in a “fragmented sense of time,” a “reduced attention span and general impatience with sustained inquiry,” a “shattered faith in institutions,” a “divorce from the past,” an “estrangement from geographic place and community,” “language erosion,” the “waning of the private self,” and an “absence of any strong vision of a personal or collective future.” He further fretted about “the decline of the prestige of authorship” and a “major sacrifice of authority,” not to mention “cognitive and moral paralysis.”

[From the October 2023 issue: Fiction on trial]

Like many of his fellow eulogists, Birkerts worried most about a loss of so-called deep reading. Later, the National Endowment for the Arts was similarly concerned, warning in 2004 that a survey showing a decline in “literary reading” justified a “bleak assessment of the decline of reading’s role in the culture” and was cause for “grave concern” about “irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation” leading to “vast cultural impoverishment.”

In response, Leah Price has been a voice of calm and reason. In What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, the founder of the Initiative for the Book at Rutgers University noted that in the years after the book had been declared dead, sales of printed books rose as those of electronic books drooped. “When we mourn the book, we’re really mourning the death of those in-between moments,” she wrote. Worry for the book is a proxy for other fears. “We may be seeking refuge from technological and commercial upheavals, from the people and places that crowd in on us, or from our own sickness and weakness. The problem is that treating the book as a bunker may shortchange its potential to engage with the world.”

The book is often seen as an escape from humanity. That is just what its critics once feared: that young people and especially women would lose themselves in fictional worlds and their passions. “Just over a century ago,” Price wrote, “one moralist warned that ‘some people cannot stand very exciting or thrilling stories, just as some people are better without any wine.’” The book historian Roger Chartier said: “Uncontrolled reading was held to be dangerous because it combined corporeal immobility and excitation of the imagination. It introduced the worst ills: an engorged stomach or intestines, deranged nerves, bodily exhaustion.” Over time, expectations regarding reading have reversed as students today are directed to engage in solitary, lengthy, and deep reading as a measure of their seriousness, intellect, and maturity. Reading equals virtue.

The book has many meanings. Books are companions, so we are not alone. Books are romantic, vessels for memory and emotion evoked by their heft and their smell. A 2017 study created a Historic Book Odor Wheel, which treated the emissions from old paper, leather, and the wood they rest upon like wine, sampling and analyzing air from libraries to dissect books’ bouquet: woody, smoky, earthy, vanilla, musty, sweet, almond, pungent. Thus the modern bookstore sells not only books but candles and cologne that smell like them. Books are feelings. Books are shields; before people were accused of avoiding human contact by staring at their phones (never mind that they could be staring at conversations with others), people were accused of antisocial behavior for reading books in public. Books mark privilege; in the libraries of the rich or the Zoom rooms of those isolating from COVID, they are status symbols. In the latter, for example, video viewers rate one another’s bookshelves and buy books just to improve their scores—“proclaiming the self through the shelf,” as the scholar Jessica Pressman put it.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The people who don’t read books]

In 2006, Kevin Kelly, a Wired editor and unabashed digital utopian, promised that a universal, digitized library would “transform the nature of what we now call the book,” because “unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.” He foresaw “real magic” when “each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages … When books are digitized, reading becomes a community activity.”

Speaking at BookExpo that year, John Updike spat curmudgeonly dudgeon in response, calling Kelly’s vision “a pretty grisly scenario.” He did not want to perform for his lunch, only to write for it. “In imagining a huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship, are we not depriving the written word of its old-fashioned function of, through such inventions as the written alphabet and printing press, communication from one person to another—of, in short, accountability and intimacy?” Updike mourned the loss of the Parenthesis: “Books traditionally have edges … In the electronic anthill, where are the edges?” He ended with a call to arms: “So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts.” Kelly and Updike dueled amid an effort by Google to scan millions of books, over the dead bodies of publishers and authors, who launched a long copyright battle in court. In 2020, researchers at UC Berkeley and Northeastern University studied the effect of digitizing books and found that, especially for less popular titles, having them searchable online increased sales of physical copies. So then digital does not destroy the book.

What is a book? In his book of that title, Joseph Dane wrote: “‘The Book’ is simultaneously a thing, a force, an event, a history.” As a scholar of early book history, Dane concentrated on the book-copy, the “material object that exists in time and space and carries with it its own unique history.” He decried the idea of “print culture” that Elizabeth Eisenstein and her chief critic, Adrian Johns, debated, declaring that “what exists is not print culture at all but rather the modern scholar’s invocation of print culture.” Dane complained that “Eisenstein defines the problematic term ‘print culture’ by opposing it to an even more problematic term ‘scribal culture’ … Scribal and print culture, if these things exist at all, coexist. They did in the late Middle Ages, they did in the early modern period, and they still do today.”

[Andrew Ferguson: There’s no substitute for print]

Did I write an entire book making the case for print culture? And am I now making a case for digital culture? Not so much. I do not think there ever was a uniform, shared vision of print culture. That is my point: We imbue the book with our own expectations and desires. In Birkerts’s case, that was to maintain a set of societal standards and norms. In Price’s case: “Seeing books thrust into the service of comfort and sanity and good taste, I started wanting to recover the book’s power to upset and unsettle and even anger readers.” My desire is for each of us to gain the perspective to interrogate the values, presumptions, meanings, norms, and expectations we instill in the book so that we can better decide what we want to preserve or change on the other side of the Parenthesis. As the scholar Andrew Piper wrote in Book Was There, “We cannot think about our electronic future without contending with its antecedent, the bookish past.” That has been my quest. “Technologies don’t just happen. At least not yet,” Piper added. “We are still agents in this story, and we have some choices to make.”

The digital age is not a blank slate; its creators and proprietors to date have already etched its surface with the decisions they have made about its operation, rules, and economy. Yet I will insist that it is early days—just over a quarter century past Netscape’s introduction; 1480 in Gutenberg years—and that we have time and opportunity to make our own decisions. I wish the book to stand as a monument to its age, soon eclipsed, but also as a still-vital institution in our lives so that we can examine our own perspectives through it. “The book has historically symbolized privacy, leisure, individualism, knowledge, and power,” Jessica Pressman wrote in Bookishness. “This means that the book has been the emblem for the very experiences that must be renegotiated in a digital era: proximity, interiority, authenticity.”

“One thing is certain: What we call culture is in fact a lengthy process of selection and filtering,” Jean-Philippe de Tonnac said in an enchanting conversation he had with Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco in the latter pair’s book, This Is Not the End of the Book. “Now more than ever, we realize that culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten.” Eco explained that culture is not about remembering everything but instead about deciding what to forget. “Culture is essentially a graveyard for books and other lost objects,” said this man who died with 35,000 books in his library. “Scholars are currently researching how culture is a process of tacitly abandoning certain relics of the past (thus filtering), while placing others in a kind of refrigerator, for the future. Archives and libraries are cold rooms in which we store what has come before, so that the cultural space is not cluttered, without having to relinquish those memories entirely.” Then here comes the internet, which “gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever … We expected globalisation to make everyone start thinking alike. What has actually happened is the opposite.”

Our institutions of print culture—editors, publishers, booksellers, critics, scholars, teachers, librarians—are unprepared on their own to help us filter, not flounder, in the abundance of what we still think of as content but that we must reconceive as conversation: voices, data, and life witnessed and recorded. Not that there hasn’t always been a problem of abundance: “Books are published at such a rapid rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant. If a person read a book a day, he would be neglecting to read four thousand others, published the same day.” So calculated the Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid. The problem—no, the opportunity—of abundance exists now on an entirely different plane, requiring new mechanisms to cope with it. “Culture filters things, telling us what we should retain and what we must forget,” Eco said.

What will digital culture be in contrast with print culture and scribal culture? I cannot say, because we have not left print culture and we have barely begun to imagine and build digital culture, let alone understand the immensity of the task before us. “Everything that has been said about life in an online world has already been said about books,” Piper wrote; he was comparing current complaints about the internet making us “stupider, twitchier, addicted, and perhaps worst of all, bad spellers” against complaints that:

“Four hundred years ago in Spain people read too many romances (Don Quixote), three hundred years ago in London too many people wrote crap (Grub Street), two hundred years ago in Germany reading had turned into a madness (the so-called Lesewut), and one hundred years ago there was the telephone. We have worried that one day there would be more authors than readers (in 1788), that self-publishing would save, and then kill, reading (in 1773), and that no one would have time to read books anymore (in 1855).”

In the early 19th century, the German poet Christoph Martin Wieland asked, “If everyone writes, who will read?” More than two centuries later, contemplating blogging, The New York Times snarked: “Never have so many people written so much to be read by so few.”

[From the November 2008 issue: Why I blog]

In the end, I will propose but one lesson: As we begin to leave Gutenberg’s Parenthesis—a journey that itself might stretch out generations ahead—and venture into the unknown future to follow, we have the blessing, the gift, of the history of books and of our transition into the Parenthesis to learn from. I pray we may avoid the pitfalls of our forebears—our Thirty Years’ War, campaigns of censorship, books as victims and weapons in fights not their own—and instead invent new art forms, new means of conversing and deliberating in democracies, new ways of learning, more paths to sharing. We do not yet know what the internet can or will be. But we do know what the book is. We have it as our standard to judge against. Let the book be the book.