The New Yorker: “Amid Fears About the Death of Books, Finding New Ways to Bring Them to Life”
From The New Yorker:
As Leah Price suggests in her brisk new study, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading” (Basic), physical books—which, ten or so years ago, many fretted might soon be obsolete—show no signs of going away. Nobody would try to pop a cyst with a Kindle or prop open a window with a phone.
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Price, who has taught English at Cambridge, Harvard, and Rutgers universities, is the founding director of the Rutgers Book Initiative, a wide-ranging venture that promotes book history at universities and libraries. She is not an elegist for print: her extraordinary grasp of every development in book history, from incunabula to beach reads, monasteries to bookmobiles, suggests that a love of printed matter need not be a form of nostalgia. She warns of the danger of turning books into a “bunker,” a place to wait out the onslaught of digital life. Print, she reminds us, was itself once a destabilizing technology.
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
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