Less mistily, there is the brilliant simplicity of the book. It remains a highly efficient "random access device," a point of view expressed by writer Nicholson Baker who, as long ago as 1995, wrote: "We've come up with a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens."
Necessity may turn out to be the midwife of innovation. Environmental pressure might provide the breakthrough.
As Brass puts it: "We cannot long sustain the un-green traffic in dead trees that lies at the root of the great paper-based empires -- newspapers, magazines, direct mail and books -- especially as the economies of China and India kick into high gear."
In the industrialized West, the IT revolution is now sending shock waves through the world of books. Last year, Google's proposed digitization of five great copyright libraries (Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and the New York Public Library) threatened the very bone-marrow of the business: copyright.
It's no surprise to find one of Google's most outspoken critics, Nigel Newton, chairman of Bloomsbury, coyly hinting at "a very big announcement" in the course of this year. Newton is certain that "within seven to 10 years, 50 percent of all book sales will be downloads. When the e-reader emerges as a mass-market item, the shift will be very rapid indeed. It will soon be a dual-format market."
That prediction makes a lot of sense. E-books will not replace the old format any more than the motorcar replaced the bicycle, or typewriters the pen.
Digitization, meanwhile, has become the buzzword. Digitize or die is how Richard Charkin puts it. He is an advocate of the opportunities afforded by the new technology, but he doesn't believe that "people are going to read novels on the screen in a serious way. Non-fiction is a different genre."
The cutting-edge of e-book innovation lies in the reference and technical book divisions. Here, he said, echoing a widespread perception, "none of the big general UK book publishers [Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin] has really embraced the new technology."
At this point, the discussion morphs from the likelihood of an e-book within a decade to a conversation about what the IT revolution is doing to the book trade on the shop floor. For Charkin, the survival of the printed book lies with "on-demand printing," in which on-demand printers, installed in bookshops and service stations, will enable the reader to access a publisher's backlist and make a high-speed print-out of a single copy of a book.
"The technology is not there yet," said Charkin, "but in 10 years, who knows?" In this vision, publishers retain the copyright and, having digitized their back catalogues, also derive income from the trade. The on-demand book will lack the aesthetic appeal of a conventional hardback, but in the knowledge economy of the 21st century, this may not be significant.
Such speculation will not liberate the written word from its inalienable place on the page. The word, written and spoken, remains at the heart of our civilization. There is every reason to want to see the printed word enhanced by something more in tune with current information technology, but until the geeky entrepreneurs of MIT, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the rest can come up with something that looks like a book, feels like a book and behaves like a book, those who handle such items every day, and marvel over the magical integration of print, paper and binding, will continue to read and enjoy books much as Gutenberg did.
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