Bookless age hardly a recent prediction
Two years ago, the nation’s first bookless library opened in San Antonio, Texas.
Bexar County’s BiblioTech offers plenty of reading material, but it’s all digital. The library’s patrons can read books from its digital collection on computer screens or borrow an e-reader to take home and rent books.
Since then, other bookless libraries have opened around the country, and there’s been a trend to remove seldom-borrowed books from shelves – particularly in school libraries – and replace them with interactive electronics. We’ve heard complaints that libraries and their mountains of books on paper are obsolete and predictions that they soon will transform to digital portals or disappear altogether.
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the digitizing of libraries. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a proposal to make bookless one of four public libraries in Newport Beach, Calif., led to a community uproar. A call by that newspaper to the proposed paperless branch confirmed that it did, indeed, continue to maintain a selection of print titles.
A similar attempt to go bookless in a Tucson, Ariz., public library in 2002 hung on for a few years, but it, too, eventually added stacks of paper books, according to a report from NPR.
It seems that many readers are stubborn, clinging selfishly to their convenient reading material and refusing to be dragged into the 21st century.
Good for them. Good for us.
It’s not as if the prediction of the Bookless Age is at all recent. We offer as evidence an article from the Washington Observer published Sept. 2, 1903, under the headline, “PREDICTS BOOKLESS AGE.” It’s a summary of another article published in the Chicago Tribune.
“Summer girls and their temporary or permanent affinities will sit in hammocks while companionable talking machines deliver effusions of love from popular novels when the prophesy of Professor H. Marion of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis is fulfilled.
“Professor Marion told a score of Chicago university professors and ambitious language students in Cobb Hall that it would not be long before printed books would be classed with ‘wall sweep’ clocks and that libraries would be made up of talking machine disks…
“‘In time,’ he declared, ‘these disks will take the place of textbooks. Paper backed novels will disappear, and instead of reading printed books the litterateur will only have to put a disk in his talking machine and have the novel read to him in the living voice of its creator.”
The popularity a century ago of wristwatches (and for that matter, the introduction of time-telling smartphones) did not eliminate the presence of wall clocks with sweep second hands. And although we can insert a book on tape or CD into our “talking machines” to listen to novels rather than to read them, books on paper not only still exist but remain nearly as popular as ever with a majority of the reading public.
There may come a day when printing on paper is considered about as practical as carving letters into stone, but that day still seems to be a long way off.
And even when that day arrives, the importance of written language, in whatever form it may appear, will be no less diminished.