The Bookless Future

It is late at night, and I am at home, in my study, doing research for a book on the culture of war in Napoleonic Europe. In an old and dreary secondary source, I find an intriguing but fragmentary quotation from a newspaper that was briefly published in French-occupied Italy in the late 1790s. I want to read the entire article from which it came. As little as five years ago, doing this would have required a forty-mile trip from my home in Baltimore to the Library of Congress and some tedious wrestling with a microfiche machine. But now I step over to my computer, open up Internet Explorer, and click to the "digital library" of the French National Library. A few more clicks, and a facsimile copy of the newspaper issue in question is zooming out of my printer. Total time elapsed: two minutes.

It is the next day, and I am in a coffee shop on my university campus, writing a conference paper. A passage from Edmund Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace comes to mind, but I can't remember the exact wording. Finding the passage, as little as five years ago, would have required going to the library, locating the book on the shelf (or not!), and paging through the text in search of the half-remembered material. Instead, on my laptop, I open Internet Explorer, connect to the wireless campus network, and type the words "Burke Letters Regicide Peace" into the Google search window. Seconds later, I have found the entire text online. I search for the words "armed doctrine" and up comes the quote. ("It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war. It has, by its essence, a faction of opinion, and of interest, and of enthusiasm, in every country.") Total time elapsed: less than one minute.

It is a few days later, and I am in my university office. I have seen a notice of a new book on Napoleonic propaganda, and am eager to read it. A few years ago, I would have walked over to the library and checked the book out. But this particular book does not exist on paper. It is an "e-book," published on the Internet only. A few clicks, and the text duly appears on my computer screen. I start reading, but while the book is well-written and informative, I find it remarkably hard to concentrate. I scroll back and forth, search for keywords, and interrupt myself even more often than usual to refill my coffee cup, check my e-mail, check the news, re-arrange files in my desk drawer. Eventually I get through the book, and am glad to have done so. But a week later I find it remarkably hard to remember what I have read.

[...]

David A. Bell, «The Bookless Future», The New Republic Online

apontado em political theory daily review

(ah!, e aceitam-se pedidos do texto completo por e-mail, quando o link deixar de funcionar e/ou não houver paciência para fazer registo.)