
Roger Horrocks
The books to come, Alan Loney (Cuneiform Press, 2010), 136 pp., $39.95
The books to come, Alan Loney (Cuneiform Press, 2010), 136 pp., $39.95
Our media landscape is changing at a greater speed than ever before. It is likely that children born 20 years from now who discover a copy of a printed newspaper will need to ask a grandparent to explain the function of this curious object.
Those children will never have seen ‘film’, a strip of celluloid with sprocket holes. (That analogue medium will be as obsolete as the megaphones through which film directors once shouted their commands.) Today’s television set will have become a quaint relic. Tomorrow’s children will also be baffled to encounter a DVD (not to mention a VHS tape), or a letter sent by ‘snail mail’, or a wristwatch, or a telephone attached by a cord to a base.
The key question for bibliophiles like ourselves is whether the printed book will similarly become obsolete. I can’t help thinking of the second-hand shop I visited in a country town the other day where old books were piled up in a corner gathering dust. So far, the traditional book has survived more vigorously than other non-digital forms of communication, but it too is visibly losing ground. Amazon now sells almost twice as many ‘e-books’ as hardcover books, and it expects e-book sales to overtake paperback sales by the end of 2011.