The book is dead. We are witnessing the funeral of the codex and the funeral pyre on which it is burning is going up in flames faster than we might at first imagine. I realize that most book lovers will immediately disagree with me, arguing for the uniqueness of the codex where one can easily navigate from front to back and in between in seconds. They will also rightly point out how a book has texture, aroma, and can be so easily portable. All of this I agree with and more. I love the feel of a finely printed book, with its gilded edges and acid free paper. Yet, something happened in the past few years that has changed my mind about the future of the book and why we will see its present form evolve into something quite different. Indeed, the book is mutating into a completely new species, the likes of which would have been unimaginable in Gutenberg’s day. It is the return of the illuminated manuscript, but this time with lights and sounds and interplay in a fashion that boggles the mind.
I think we can date the day the book died fairly precisely. No, it wasn’t the introduction of the internet in 1969 (though clearly that was the first murder weapon). No, it wasn’t the advent of the Web, as invented by Tim Berners-Lee, on one lonely night in December of 1990. No, it wasn’t even the introduction of Sony’s E-reader or Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes and Noble’s Nook.
No, the book died on January 27, 2010.