Editorial: The book is dead? Not by a long chalk

Opinion

There is no safer prediction than that of death. Sooner or later, it always comes true and this week there were, not for the first time, confident prophecies of the death of the book.

Richard Charkin, the president of the British Publishers'Association, was quoted as saying he spends four-fifths of his time worrying about technology. Not surprisingly Paul Carr, head of a web-to-print publishing house, predicts an explosion of e-books and actual, physical books becoming quaint collector's items.

Let's hold on a minute. Newspaper people are only too aware that the print medium is under challenge as the growing popularity of our own nzherald.co.nz graphically demonstrates. But publication of the obituaries for the book may be a little premature.

The confidence with which the effects of technologies are promoted is matched only by the rapidity with which they are proved wrong.

Remember when computers would usher in the leisure age and the 20-hour week? Remember the paperless office? Instead, the hardest working piece of office equipment - and that which provokes the most screams of frustration when it fails - is the printer. Millions of trees are sacrificed and the paper mountains soar as people track down documents electronically but then make printouts so they can mark them, carry them around, screw them into their handbags and read them wherever and whenever they like.

The problem with new technology, as it was once called in this business, is that it almost immediately becomes old technology. There are rooms full of computer storage disks that can no longer be accessed, homes full of videos for which in a few years there will be no players, libraries full of microfiche for which the readers are museum pieces, shelves full of LP records that no longer get played.

Can you be confident that your children will be able to find the right bit of gear to see all those digital pictures you are fondly storing? There was no problem when the family snaps were thrown into shoeboxes under the stairs, provided the damp didn't get them. And there is no problem with a reading device when you pick up a book.

The book is a stunningly successful achievement, perfected over generations, compact, portable and exceptionally durable. Try dropping your e-paper reader down a flight of stairs.

Humans are physical beings and we retain physical and spatial skills. In the high-tech world of aviation where pilots can be reduced to computer minders, until things go wrong, air traffic controllers have remained wedded to using real strips of paper and systems designers have had to build on the controllers' physical experience to develop satisfactory electronic systems.

It would be falling into the nostalgia trap to think we can give up digitised information retrieval. Compare attempting to remember which textbook contains a particular reference, finding it, wading through the index and trying to keep the book open in six places with fingers and thumbs to the ease of hitting Control F.

And there are plenty of parents who would welcome any word delivery system that can get their children to read anything longer and more articulate than a text message

But when it comes to lying on the beach with a novel, safe in the knowledge it won't matter much if it gets sand in it or you spill the beer on it? The book is dead? Perhaps not yet.