During the last decades of the twentieth-century I slumbered in the certainty that I need never leave my naive ghetto of the humanities. Like others of my acquaintance who drifted into, or otherwise ended up in, some bookish “profession,” I was deaf to the contempt of those in the “hard sciences” — I didn’t know any of those people and in my tribe of half-hearted Luddites dyscalculia was de rigueur.

Having written this, I find a passage in C.P. Snow’s famous book, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), whose thesis I might have been designed to illustrate: “If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of western intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the industrial revolution, much less accept it. Intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites.” According to Snow, the two polar cultures are the literary and the scientific, “Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension– sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground.”

I hope I won’t have to say more than once that I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, and I’m no intellectual. Also, I haven’t read Snow’s book, not much of it, anyway. As Peter Dizikes wrote in the Times last year, “few people actually seem to read Snow’s book… Why bother when its main point appears so evident?”

But, otherwise, growing up, I took all of that for granted.

I didn’t turn a computer on until I was thirty-three. When I began my first job in publishing, in 1995, we filled out title cards by hand, and used electric typewriters to answer correspondence. I was told then that, of the major houses, St. Martin’s, at least, had still not equipped its staff with the one thing that henceforth everybody would need to survive in the guild devoted to reproduction of the codex, our now obsolescent technology. Here was a contradiction that would mature: “the world’s largest bookstore” (Amazon also debuted in 1995) is entirely virtual and its foundational product today nears extinction, to be replaced by a “device” (cf., “the accessory” in Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That) whose form is now rapidly and unpredictably mutating.

Microsoft's Courier

The contempt of the hard scientists is like nothing unto the contempt of the IT guy, as we learned when we were forced to hire him to coddle our machines and explain such rudiments as would allow us to use them.  Those of us of a certain age or disposition were treated like the technological children that we were, or are.

All of which is to say that until Gray Powell’s misplaced iPhone became much-attended news, I had never heard of Gizmodo.

It turns out, though, that Gizmodo is more likely than, say, Publishers Weekly, to scoop the story of the last days of publishing as we have known it — and to herald that final technological kick in the pants that will irrevocably antiquate and expel me and my kind once and for all. I, for one, will go quietly.

(HarperCollins editor Bill Strachan, ex-Henry Holt, Columbia University Press, and Avalon, summed things up for me when he was quoted in a New York Observer article in 2008, during the roll-out of Harper’s short-lived Collins experiment: “I think it’s a really exciting time for publishing,” he said. “I really do. Not for me, necessarily, but, you know.”)

Gizmodo takes credit for discovering last year that Microsoft had been developing what would have been a competitor to Amazon’s Kindle: a hinged, folding (like a book, only, of course, better), two-screened tablet named Courier. Although “Courier had never been publicly announced or acknowledged as a Microsoft product . . .  It appeared from the leaked information last year that a Courier prototype was probably near to completion.”

Last Friday, Gizmodo reported that Courier has been cancelled. They quote Microsoft Corporate VP of Communications, Frank Shaw: “The Courier project . . .  will be evaluated for use in future offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time.”

H.P.'s Slate

Reported on the same day was Hewlett-Packard’s cancellation of its own Kindle-challenger, the Slate, a device that had been acknowledged and unveiled, and was slated for sale. It was also meant to be powered by Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, which will now, apparently, be replaced by “ variant of the webOS platform [HP] acquired when the company bought smartphone maker Palm Inc for $1.2 billion.”

I think I’ve got the gist of it. (Incidentally, every report I read about this cited a TechCrunch report.)

Of course, this news isn’t really a reprieve. There won’t be a reprieve. Those who are able to create these machines will continue to create them and whether they are beneficial, needed, or wanted they will supplant the book. Books are not, as digital cheerleaders have it, merely containers of information that can be emptied into another (digital) container. Marshall McLuhan proposed that power resides in the medium rather than its specific content (which is a separate, independent medium) — “the medium is the message.” Those chiefly responsible for the development and propagation of the ebook are representatives of an alien culture that is antithetical to that of the book. The repercussions of the disappearance of books cannot be predicted. But the hegemony of one of the two cultures will not be reversed.

Publishing is no longer a refuge for schlemiels. (I learned this word from Thomas Pynchon or, more accurately, Benny Profane, whose self-descriptive use of it, which I adopted circa 1979, is not pejorative, but exculpatory: “inanimate objects and he could not live in peace.” Let it be my epitaph.) The marginalizing of book people by illiterate bankers, speculators, accountants, marketers, and technocrats — the whole panoply of today’s “publishing industry,” nauseating epithet, is an old story, older than Barry O’Callaghan’s gambling with Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin, or Alberto Vitale’s vanquishing of André Schiffrin’s Pantheon, or Borders’ hire of a grocer as CEO (and to groceries he did return).

But now the thing itself is to be got rid of and my natural enemies, having innovated our reason for being right out of existence, will finally have publishing to themselves. What they want it for, I’ve never understood.