The Teleprinted Book Of The Future: One Researcher's Flight Of Fancy

It would appear that the book as a cultural institution is in danger of extinction. Indeed, there are those who assert that computer technology has made the library obsolete. But while important books may be read by a diminishing minority, it is a demanding and significant minority that can be disregarded only at great peril. Now, it is true that the printing, publication, and distribution of books are clearly in crisis. While more books than ever are being published, Sir Thomas Gresham's law telling us that bad money drives out the good applies with equal force to books. It is an irony that, while modern technology has created electronic typesetting and printing--which, whenever used, have dramatically reduced the cost of book production--the intensive labor, paper, distribution, and marketing expen- ses have, at the same time, risen so steeply as to jeopardize the long-term survival of the printed book as a major component of modern civilization. Today, books are published and sold in increasingly large editions to amortize their cost and generate income. This means that insignificant books endowed with great popular interest and demand can be published at a profit, while works of substance--with, as a rule, much more limited appeal--must be sold at a far higher price to survive in the marketplace. The inevitable consequence is that individuals and libraries are discouraged from buying them. In turn, publishers and editors--in the effort to retain their jobs in an increasingly volatile industry run mostly by bean-counters-- must think long and hard before backing a meritorious but risky manuscript for publication. The classic contemporary example that comes to my mind is the definitive biography of Harry S Truman by David McCullough, whose raw manuscript, before finally finding a publisher and eventually gaining considerable popularity, was repeatedly rejected for being too long, for being of limited interest, and for tilling already well-plowed ground. But it is not principally trade manuscripts that suffer the worst ignominies. Far more important--and their fate, therefore, far more lamentable--are works of art, history, philosophy, fiction, poetry, science, technology, and medicine, the very books that civilized society has a stake in encouraging and disseminating. In the last analysis, these are the books that encompass the record, the memory, and the substance of human civilization. The encouraging news, however, is that the technology endangering the book as it has existed since Gutenberg is also poised to come to its rescue. The printed book has attributes of great convenience compared with every other existing form of information storage and retrieval--no matter how sophisticated--and it is unlikely to be easily superseded. It is hard to imagine taking a microfilm reader to scan in bed, reading an overhead projection on the cool edge of a running brook, or curling up with a computer display in front of a crackling wood fire. No matter what the ingenuity of man can ultimately afford, the book remains a more universally human-oriented, concentrated, and comfortable device to convey the written word than anything thus far invented. How to retain all the ergonomic advantages of the book while doing away with its defining economic burdens is the question that my imagination addresses here. Although it is premature to outline the precise technical details that are yet to be developed, my speculative flight of technological fancy--or at least an approximation or variation of it--is within the realm of possibility for the foreseeable future. Imagine, if you will, that you are at home and at loose ends. There is nothing on television or radio that appeals to you. But one of last Sunday's newspaper book reviews intrigues you. Of course, this late in the evening, libraries and most book shops are closed. If your library or shop is by any chance still open, the likelihood of finding the desired book--too new to be a best-seller--on its shelves would be very slim. And even if you were lucky enough to locate a copy, you might want to leaf through it first before borrowing or buying it. Imagine further that, in addition to television, radio, computer, and stereo, there is in your living room or study a black box--not a huge black box, but sizable enough to accommodate my fantasy. It hosts a display screen and, positioned below it, a quite capacious rectangular slot. Adjacent to the black box is a keyboard very much like the one for your computer; and on a shelf above the box is a collection of books of different sizes and colors but without titles. A visitor to your study would be surprised to see, when taking one of them off the shelf, that all its pages are blank. Indeed, these volumes contain no words--for their pages are blank visual tapes of a sort, onto which temporary typography and graphics will be imprinted and read like any ordinary book, then erased after use. To imprint a blank book, you will first type a request on the black box keyboard. Your request is relayed to one of many data banks that collectively access every published book on every available subject. Sources include, for example, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., as well as international repositories such as the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris, which, incidentally, is today in the process of computerizing its treasures. After the request for a particular book has been entered, instructions appear on the black box screen, requiring that you specify the size of the blank volume that you wish to have printed and, if desired, the colors you wish to see used in the printing. The instructions also inform you of the price you will be charged for this service. Next, you insert the appropriate blank book into the slot in the black box, and within a minute or so the book is ejected--its formerly blank pages now in proper order and filled with text and multicolored illustrations. For economic as well as technical reasons, the book will not be a permanent addition to your library, since after a time- -perhaps a few weeks--the type will fade and eventually disappear. Of course, you can "renew" your copy by teleprinting it again if you so desire, with the cost being charged to your account. For a permanent edition, you would have to purchase the kind of costly book that is available today. The implications of such a scenario are staggering. Libraries as we know them might be eliminated, becoming instead repositories primarily of the most significant and enduring works, including major reference volumes. The process would eliminate the high investment costs, inconvenience, and headaches of lending libraries. It would bring to each individual potential access to the total scope of the written word on every subject and in every language. For economic reasons, popular but ephemeral books would probably exist solely in this short-lived form, stored permanently only in central data banks in digitally compressed format. The technology involved might, for example, consist of an advanced form of liquid crystal, with paper-thin, pixel-sized capacitors retaining electrical charges displaying characters for a few weeks. But, in a fantasy, the details are unimportant. My point is that it is possible to conceive of a teleprinting technology that could emulate and exceed the scope of today's Internet. Sociologist Wilbur Schramm has provided a keen insight on the subject: It took some 5 million years for mankind to advance from primitive elements of a spoken language to the written word. It took 5,000 years to move from the written word on stone tablets and parchment to movable-type printing. From Gutenberg's Bible to television, less than 500 years elapsed. Each of these major advances in information handling took, on average, one order of magnitude less time than the preceding one. If this pattern continues, it seems reasonable to expect teleprinting of books to make its appearance shortly after the beginning of the 21st century. Elie A. Shneour, a physical biochemist, is chief executive and director of research at Biosystems Research Institute, San Diego. E-mail: eshneour@ucsd.edu.

The Teleprinted Book Of The Future: One Researcher's Flight Of Fancy

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of