The globally available Kindle could mark as big a shift for reading as the printing press and the codex
via The Wall Street Journal by Stephen Marche
On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text. The question is how. And the answer can be found in the history of earlier book forms.
Most literate people are familiar with at least some of the consequences of the print revolution of the 15th century, but far fewer are as aware of the much more profound change that occurred when rolls were replaced by codices—pages bound between covers—in the late Roman period. Think of the scattered, tattered remainders of the Dead Sea Scrolls—each text is isolated and vulnerable. Codices were originally mini-libraries, much more useful and easy than storing masses of loose individual texts.
In "Christianity and the Transformation of the Book" (2007), Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams argue that the codex was one of the keys to the nascent power of Christianity in the late Roman period: "The rise of the codex, with its compact proportions, greatly intensified the physical—as well as the symbolic—concentration of cultural power that a sizable library embodied." The Gospels became both a single object and a small library. The simple act of binding involved the bringing together of voices and interests, a move from having the Lamentations of Jeremiah and histories of the Kings of Israel and the laws of Moses to having the Bible which contains them all.
The development of the codex was a shift from thinking of literature as a unique object, like a painting, to seeing it as an institutional object. Conversely, as the codex came to dominate as a means of intellectual transmission, the scroll began to take on the status of a holy object, which is why synagogues keep the Torah in scrolls.
The introduction of the printing press brought a similarly enormous change to the nature of reading. One of the most interesting figures in that transformation is the great Benedictine scholar Trithemius. He lived in Sponheim in the 15th century and managed to amass a library fully half the size of the Vatican library, an incredible achievement. He was also the author of "In Praise of Scribes," the foremost defense of scribal practice, in favor of writing things out and against printing them.
He reminds me particularly of Nicholson Baker, who disapproves highly of Kindle 2. I mean the comparison absolutely as a compliment to Mr. Baker, who recently published a diatribe against Kindle with the subtitle "Centuries of Evolved Beauty Rinsed Away." His argument boils down to how much he likes the feel of paper. Trithemius had stronger arguments against the newfangled technology of the press: Printed books could never match the beauty and uniqueness of a copied text; copying produced a state of contemplation which was spiritually beneficial; and copying was a way of reducing error, which indeed it was at first.
His central claim was that hand-produced books were inherently holy. His leading anecdote is the story of a scribe who died after decades of copying texts. When they disinterred him, the three fingers of his right hand, his writing hand, had not decomposed. Anyone who has held a handmade medieval missal—or even a handwritten letter—knows what Trithemius is talking about: the sense that someone is communicating something to you personally.
But "In Praise of Scribes" is a good object lesson in the impossibility of avoiding technological change. Trithemius didn't have his book copied. Too few people could have read it that way. It went straight to the printing press (just as Nicholson Baker's polemic against Kindle 2 is available online). Trithemius was the first in a line of would-be Luddites who couldn't resist the power of the new.
My paper library consists of 2,000 volumes, making it both much too big and much too small. I consider a working library to have about 5,000 volumes, but a mere 2,000 has been sufficient to be one of the most continuous problems of my life. Moving it around is a nightmare. A hundred boxes of books is a terrible burden in the 21st century. Yet I know that I will never get rid of them. I'm too attached now. Just as the ancients respected the scroll more after the development of the book, just as the hand-written manuscript became sacred after the invention of print, the printed book is now beginning to glow with its own obsolescence.
But I am immensely excited for the new phase of the book. So far the new technology has been called the "e-reader," a term obviously picked by engineers, not poets. In literary terms it's a transbook, by which I mean that it is the book which can contain all books. Why are so many writers so afraid of this staggeringly wonderful possibility? A book is a singular object that can contain many voices, but the transbook has the potential to be a singular object containing all voices. It is not just another kind of media; it is the dream of ultimate text.
We are still in early days, but it is obvious where the transbook is headed: It will eventually provide access to all text that is non-copyright, and to the purchase of every book in or out of "print." Kindle 2's boast of being able to hold 1,500 titles will eventually sound as ludicrous as those early ads for floppy disks boasting that they could hold up to 64k of data. We will want everything and we will get it. Possibly there will eventually develop a subscription service, which provides access to all books for a monthly fee. At any rate, a single object will contain the contents of all the world's libraries. It's just a matter of when that will happen. And who will profit.
Kindle 2 isn't really about what we may or may not want as readers and writers. It's about what the book wants to be. And the book wants to be itself and everything. It wants to be a vast abridgment of the universe that you can hold in your hand. It wants to be the transbook.
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