YEARNING AFTER BOOKS

YEARNING AFTER BOOKS: Why are so many artists and writers
preoccupied by the so-called demise of bookish culture?
see article at: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/10/2008101001c.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

......."The most eloquent reflection I have found on the future of books is Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night (2006), which strikes a balance between romanticism and realism, nostalgia and foresight. His reflections on books and technology emphasize complementarity rather than conflict: "The birth of a new technology need not mean the death of an earlier one: The invention of photography did not eliminate painting, it renewed it, and the screen and the codex can feed off each other and coexist amicably on the same reader's desk."
And, it may be that electronic technology is even more fragile than books. "There may come a new technique of collecting information next to which the Web will seem to us habitual and homely in its vastness," Manguel writes, "like the aged buildings that once lodged the national libraries in Paris and Buenos Aires, Beyrouth and Salamanca, London and Seoul."
We are pained by the change of familiar bookish institutions, but, before long, I expect we will begin to feel nostalgia for the microfilm and the CD-ROM and yearn for a time when the Internet was as fresh and young as our belief in its capacity to replace the printed book and the library."