The Future of the Book

by Geoffrey Nunberg

The death of the book has been duly announced, and with it the end of brick-and-mortar libraries, traditional publishers, linear narrative, authorship, and disciplinarity, along with the emergence of a more equitable discursive order. These essays suggest that it won't be that simple. The digitization of discourse will not be effected without some wrenching social and cultural dislocations.

The contributors to this volume are enthusiastic about the possibilities created by digital technologies, instruments that many of them have played a role in developing and deploying. But they also see the new media raising serious critical issues that force us to reexamine basic notions about rhetoric, reading, and the nature of discourse itself.

Genres: Literature

308 pages, Paperback

First published November 19, 1996

About the author

Geoff Nunberg is a linguist and professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information in Berkeley, California, USA. He is also a frequent contributor to the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air".

Reviews

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never fear! The book is not going away! (Apparently)

This book is a collection of essays about the disappearance (or the possibility of the disappearance) of books, both in the physical sense, as well as the broader topic of literature itself. A lot of essays talk about hypertext, which also gets interesting, looking at how computers and hypertext could change the way we read and how "literature" is written (or "written").

There are some unintentionally funny moments, since this book is from 1996. There's a lot like "There's this new thing with computers, called the World Wide Web, or WWW, and you can create your own 'homepage' or access other people's websites from around the world!" and comments about whether computer monitors will ever be high enough quality to read off of them without feeling like you're staring at pixels.

[Dosia]

nah

[Javier Ponce · Rating 3 out of 5]

It feels like we could have been spared a few chapters from this book. After a while, some of the arguments are touched upon repeatedly.