Editorial: Books' demise not just yet

OPINION: As we approach the end of the year, the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, there is a tendency for people to make bold pronouncements about the end of eras, the end of technologies, the end of days for things previously held dear.

We talk of something that has been around for decades or even millennia and then plot its demise, sometimes with delicious excitement. Even the planet is not spared the ruminations and rantings of the modern-day doomsayer.

In the latest Newsweek magazine, the man who founded internet retailer Amazon just 15 years ago is making his own pronouncement of doom about something that has been around for hundreds of years.

Jeff Bezos is preaching an end to books; not the written word, as such, but more the format in which they are presented to the reader. His company has developed the Kindle, a kind of electronic tablet that can store and display many books and its success has surprised even those selling it.

This has inspired Mr Bezos to jauntily describe a future in which more and more young people will happily burn their books to stand in line and kneel before the shiny, metallic shrine of electronic new-literature; until the book will be something collecting dust behind glass in a museum, the subject of school visits by young children who will shake their heads at what their grand-parents used to put up with: Just how did they do it?

In fact, Mr Bezos' commentary in the Newsweek is almost a warm, loving eulogy said at the funeral of the printed word.

"You know, we love stories and we love narrative," he says. "We love to get lost in an author's world. But the physical book has had a 500-year run. It's probably the most successful technology ever. But no technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever." Certainly, it is right and fair to point out that technology has changed dramatically.

But people like Mr Bezos forget that advances in technology cannot alter the fact that we remain a largely social animal who relies on more than one of our senses to experience and understand the world around them. There will be subjects, especially in non-fiction titles, where an ability to highlight video, could be of benefit to the reader.

But fiction remains a journey of imagination and adventure and that voyage begins with a much-anticipated trip to the book store or library, the subtle but very real pleasure of the smell and feel of a new book and the simple but elegant delivery of this great technology. Just as other technologies thought set for extinction have survived, albeit with smaller audiences, books will be around for some time yet, possibly for at least another 500 years.

- © Fairfax NZ News