The Future of Books
I am rather bad at making a coherent arguement. I get on my rail and ride it all the way down without even noticing the branches where my opinion goes dangerously south.
That said… when the Wall Street Journal makes a ridiculously inaccurate and close-minded argument, it taints the entire article. Check it out:
For starters, think about what happened because of the printing press: The ability to duplicate, and make permanent, ideas that were contained in books created a surge in innovation that the world had never seen before. Now, the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly will make finding all that information easier yet again. Expect ideas to proliferate — and innovation to bloom — just as it did in the centuries after Gutenberg.
So I am supposed to believe that there were no books before the printing press? Or that “the ability to duplicate” ideas was new? That the ability to “make permanent” ideas was new? Maybe my memory is faulty (and it is) but I was taught that the printing press brought fast and cheap book duplication. Fast and cheap were the innovations, not duplicate and “make permanent.”
I was going to stop there, but this article just gets better as it goes along. Who the heck wrote this thing? Steven Johnson… Hmmm. This has got to be a Dvorak piece and he’s got me. Read more