The Book Will Not Die

During the last Davos summit, in 2008, regarding the phenomena that will shock humanity in the next fifteen years, a futurologist, questioned, proposed to consider only four main ones, which seemed certain to him. The first is the fact that a barrel of oil will cost five hundred dollars. The second concerns water, called to become a commercial product of exchange exactly like oil. In short, we will see the flow of water on the Stock Exchange. The third prediction concerns Africa, which will certainly become an economic power for him in the coming decades, which we all hope.

The fourth phenomenon, according to this professional prophet, is the disappearance of the book.

At this point, therefore, the question is whether the definitive disappearance of the book, if it really happened, could have the same consequences for humanity as the planned scarcity of water, for example, or the inaccessibility of oil.

Will the book disappear due to the appearance of the Internet? I had written on this subject at the time, when the question seemed relevant. Now, every time someone asks me to comment on it, I can do nothing but repeat the same text. In any case, nobody notices it, first of all because there is nothing more unpublished than what has already been published and then because public opinion (or at least journalists) always has this fixed idea that the book will disappear. (or perhaps journalists think that readers have this fixed idea) and each tirelessly asks the same question.

In reality, there is very little to say on this issue. With the Internet, we have returned to the alphabetical era. If we ever thought we had entered the civilization of images, the computer has reintroduced us to the Gutenberg galaxy and everyone is now forced to read. To read, you need a stand. This media cannot be the only computer. Try spending two hours on the computer reading a novel and your eyes will become tennis balls! At home I have Polaroid glasses that allow me to protect my eyes from the damage of constant reading on the screen but it is not a sufficient solution. In addition, the computer depends on the presence of electricity and does not allow you to read in the bath or lie on the side of the bed. The book, therefore, is on balance a more flexible tool.

Of two things, one: either the book will remain the support for reading or there will be something that will resemble what the book never stopped being, even before the invention of printing.

The variations around the book object have not changed its function, nor its syntax, for more than five hundred years. The book is like the spoon, the hammer, the wheel, the scissors. Once you've invented them, you can't do better. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon. For example, designers try to improve corkscrews, with very modest successes: most of them don't work. Philippe Starck tried to innovate the juicers, but his model (to safeguard a certain aesthetic purity) lets the seeds pass. The book has passed its tests and it is not seen how, for the same function, we could do something better. Perhaps it will evolve in its components, perhaps its pages will no longer be made of paper. But it will remain what it is.

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