Bird On The Wire an online column by Carmel Bird   No. 1 18 March 1998
	Is the book dying? I heard Alistair Cook in his Letter From America last week reflecting on the fact that the Britannica is on CD-Rom and may disappear as hard copy. He believes the book is 'on the way out'. Maybe he's right -- it often looks that way. But being on the way out doesn't necessarily mean leaving the scene quickly or altogether. It's a long time since people queued up on the dock for copies of the next chapter of Great Expectations to arrive from London -- the crowds now gather at the cinema or rush the video shop or get online. But it seems to me that books are still holding a little ground that perhaps they will never give up. They are now just one element in the telling of -- and the marketing of -- stories. At the opulent opening night of the movie the movie stars and the director are the celebrities we want to see. We thirst not only for the plot of the movie, but for the details of the lives of the stars. We are dimly aware that Thomas Keneally wrote the novel (Schindler's Ark) that gave us Schindler's List, but his is not the life we want to see exposed in the tabloids. However, when the spectacle of the movie has receded, and we are left with the video, some people still like to be able to return to base, to go back to the small, portable object they can rest on the edge of the bedclothes and read in sections over a couple of weeks before they go to sleep. The book is not only for enjoyment, or for information, but plays a big part in our ability to reflect, to think; a big part in the formation of wisdom. The book is an elegant piece of technology that has perhaps earned a permanent tactile place in human society. You may be surprised to hear me talking up the book, since I have recently made a CD-Rom to accompany a novel (Red Shoes). What am I playing at? I like experiments and I was doing an experiment. I don't know how it will all turn out in the end. And to be fair, the book is published in hard copy as well as digitally. But will hard copy drop off, leaving only Roms and laser disks and books online and so on? Perhaps people will really stop reading words and just go completely with the images and sounds? Will people give up, forget how to read? All that stuff about humans moving from pictures to hieroglyphics to letters -- is it a great big circle leading back to pics? I am enjoying hearing how people are using the book and the CD-Rom of Red Shoes -- so many different ways of doing it. I hope the Britannica in hard copy doesn't die. And I have a wild vision that in some kind of utopian book place, bad books will be the ones to disappear and good books might have the opportunity to get better. (Dream on ...)
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