Is this the end of the printed book?
That e-books have surged in popularity in recent years is not news, but where they are headed – and what effect this will ultimately have on the printed word – is unknown. Are printed books destined to eventually join the ranks of clay tablets, scrolls and typewritten pages, to be displayed in collectors’ glass cases with other curious items of the distant past?
While no one can say with certainty what the future holds for paper books, it is thought that what is a plateau now will, at some point, return to a steep incline. The affordances of screen reading will continuously improve and expand, offering people a reason to switch to screens.
Books themselves, however, likely won’t disappear entirely, at least not anytime soon. Like woodblock printing, hand-processed film and folk weaving, printed pages may assume an artisanal or aesthetic value. Books meant not to be read but to be looked at – art catalogues or coffee table collections – will likely remain in print form for longer as well. Print will exist, but it will be in a different realm and will appeal to a very limited audience, like poetry does today. Though the locus of intellectual discourse is going to move away from print.
The eventual and total demise of print is inevitable, though such a day won’t arrive for perhaps 50 to 100 or more years. It will get harder and harder to understand why anyone would print something that’s heavy, hard to ship and not customisable. So, there will come a point where print just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
While some might mourn the aesthetic loss of the printed book, is there anything else we risk forfeiting should print disappear entirely? Some research indicates that there is cause for concern. According to some research findings, electronic reading can negatively impact the way the brain responds to text, including reading comprehension, focus and the ability to maintain attention to details like plot and sequence of events. Research roughly indicates that print falls on one end of the reading spectrum (the most immersive) and that online text occurs at the other end (the most distracting). Kindle reading seems to fall somewhere in the middle. “A lot of people are worried that our ability to enter into the story is changing,” Some says. “The worry is that we’ll have a short-circuited reading brain, excellent for gathering information but not necessarily for forming critical, analytical deep reading skills.”
We at F.B.A. do not see the end of the traditional printed book. Yes. The market for newsprint and magazines will become almost digital – but we ask: ‘Has photography replaced painting?’ In like manner, F.B.A. s ever growing library of rare, antique, and specialist books will always offer books that are intrinsically good and worthy of any good library.
