Publish at August 31 2010 Updated September 14 2023
According to Tim Carmody, who published an article entitled 10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books in The Atlantic on August 25, 2010, the digital book is not an isolated break in the great history of books and reading. Rather, we need to place the emergence of this object in a broader perspective, to understand that the current evolution is rooted in much earlier revolutions.
What revolutions are we talking about? Carmody's list is astonishing. It includes, of course, the invention of the alphabet, the invention of printing, the transition from the scroll to the codex (the book as an object), the industrialization of production... but these phenomena are considered from unusual angles, with the author's clearly stated ambition to hold the thread that leads us to the latest avatars of reading.
The invention of the alphabet is seen from the angle of the fusion of the oral and the written in a limited number of signs, which largely served the development of classical Greek culture: " The fusion of orality and writing explains the power of classical Hellenic culture. Song and dance became literature. Debate became rhetoric and philosophy. The Greeks were then able to incorporate the knowledge of the civilized world into their own language, and transmit their own amalgamated culture wherever they went ".
Another example of a major revolution was the invention of the printing press. According to the researcher quoted by Carmody, the printing press gave readers the guarantee of reading the exact replica of the coveted text. This had the effect of creating a common language in what was then an extremely fragmented Europe, and of including all readers of the same language in an "imaginary community", the crucible of the concept of the nation-state. What's more, the printing press (and before it, writing itself, but radically extending this phenomenon) established the primacy of the visual over the auditory in the reading of a text, " paving the way for our screen-bound present ".
The expansion of cultures capable of spreading throughout the world via the written word and integrating knowledge forged in other civilizations, the domination of the visual... These phenomena still characterize the way we read and distribute texts, and the digital book is just one more illustration.
In his article, Carmody highlights two other reading revolutions that are less well known to the general public.
First, the shift from intensive to extensive reading. In other words, according to the German historian Rolf Engelsing, quoted by Carmody, in the 18th century we moved from the attentive and repeated reading of a limited number of texts (the Bible, a few collections of poems, etc.) to the rapid and superficial reading of a large number of texts (thanks in particular to the expansion of the printed press). This is a major trend, with many exceptions (think of the success of certain novels that are read and reread over and over again, or even memorized by their fans), and one that has echoes in contemporary times; just think of the chorus of complaints against infobesity, the sheer number of things to read and integrate since the Internet has increased the pace of information dissemination to unheard-of proportions. Think also of our ordinary reading practices on the web, of the apparent attention deficit created by the systematization of hyperlinks in the body of the text, and we'll see that extensive reading practices have not yet found their limits.
Secondly, the transition from vertical reading (on parchment or papyrus scrolls) to horizontal reading (in books placed on the table), with a return to vertical reading since the beginning of the twentieth century. It was Walter Benjamin who pointed out this change as early as 1928, observing that the size of newspaper pages forced us to hold them vertically or obliquely in front of us, and that the organization of texts on each page also encouraged the vertical movement of the eye across the page. Walter Benjamin never knew the computer screen; a few decades later, he could have verified the validity of his observation. And we still hold reading terminals obliquely in front of us; in other words, we've got rid of the desk or table that used to support large volumes and, since the invention of newspapers and paperbacks, we carry our reading media everywhere with us, simultaneously modifying the space and time of reading. This is the real revolution, according to Carmody, of which the digital book is only the latest avatar.
This fascinating article is complemented by a second, which presents the results of initial surveys carried out among a sample of 1,200 people who have recently acquired a reading device in the United States. The results show that the competition between paper and electronic media has had no negative impact on the habits of readers who have switched from one to the other. 40% of those surveyed said they read more since acquiring their e-reader, and 58% said they read as much as before. What's more, reading on an electronic device has not caused them to stop buying paper books. This is confirmed by Amazon, the world's biggest seller of digital books. In addition, e-reader users read in situations that are not at all compatible with this activity: one reader said she had used her e-reader... on a canoe-kayak. And, like the famous novelist Michael Connelly, they appreciate the space and weight savings (when it comes to taking their books with them) provided by the e-reader. News from Japan confirms this advantage: it seems that a growing number of Japanese are digitizing their paper books, destroying them in the process, so that they can read them on their e-reader... and free up a little space in their homes.
So, is the e-book a revolution? Certainly not. The digital book is part of a series of changes in reading media and modes that have been underway for centuries. So it's not a break with the past, but rather an exploitation of the possibilities offered by digital technology to further increase the portability of texts, the number of texts read, and the dissemination of the written word beyond national borders. What's more, initial survey results show that the e-book, while undermining the paper book as an industrial object (which we sometimes try to get rid of, as not every book deserves to be kept indefinitely...), does not harm reading.
As usual, a historical perspective helps to put the real scope of a technological innovation into perspective, and to give contradictory arguments their true value.
10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books Tim Carmody, The Atlantic, August 25, 2010
The ABCs of E-Reading Geoffrey A. Fowler and Marie C. Baca, The Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2010
All about "jisui " Virginie Clayssen, teXtes, August 20, 2010
Photo credits: goXunuReviews, Flickr, CC License and Wikimedia Commons.
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