The Future History of the Book: Time, Attention, Convention

What is the state of the book today? This is not an inquiry after the book’s health. Questions of the book’s ostensible decline have hounded it for decades, if not centuries, and have variously led to the conclusion that the book is dying, or that it is in the prime of its life, depending. I have argued at length elsewhere that anxieties about the book’s obsolescence are frequently driven by the conservative impulse to shore up the hierarchies between the book and newer media forms (and, not at all incidentally, the hierarchies between those who participate in what we might think of as book culture and those who happily engage with newer media), and I hope in this chapter not to dwell for too long on that phenomenon.1 Rather, I am asking after the book’s physical state, in a different sense: is it solid or liquid—or perhaps more pertinently, does it exist in some altogether ambiguous state? The book has always been, like light, both particle and wave—both material substance and transmitted information. I begin by asking about the book’s physical state in order to open a series of questions—and this essay, I should admit up front, is more question than answer—about what might become of the book, and of our relationship to it, as its material substance changes.