After the Book?

Abstract

The book as we know it has been a significant phenomenon for only a relatively short span of history—about a century and a half—only in certain areas and in certain cultures. Today, the enveloping matrix of our intellectual and emotional lives is not a reader’s climate. The status of the book is changing, as is the make-up of the "language-world" we inhabit. The written word has become a caption for the visual and the musical image. Our verbal inheritance is caught between the semi-literacy of the mass market and the minutia of the specialist. The written word persists, but new forms for its circulation will bring alterations of our sensibilities and modification in our habits of discovery.