I try to make a practice of looking on futureofthebook.com (devoted to the “preservation and persistence of the changing book”–“book”specified as the “codex book”) to be soothed by the orphic utterances of Gary Frost, a man who has devoted much of his life to the preservation of bound volumes and to celebrating their properties of “haptic” communication. Mr. Frost is not a luddite but rather persists in demonstrating the advantages of a technology–the book–that certain technophiles have already declared dead.

Like anybody else, I occasionally indulge in the luxury of reading people whose opinions I’m likely to agree with. When technology is the subject this is dangerous practice, if only because I’m certain that those sharing my opinions will not prevail–a fight between the desire to be comforted and its enemy, clear-sightedness, ensues. At futureofthebook.com I find certain of my thoughts anticipated, bolstered, and better expressed.

In an earlier post, I wrote that “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.” Recently, under the heading “suspicion,” futureofthebook posits an imperfect corollary:

There is always the suspicion that fans of screen reading have no idea of the nature of book reading and are the least reliable sources for projections of the future of the book.

I am convinced by the first half of this postulate but fear that the second half may be more comforting than reliable. To create books for a mass audience requires extra-literary and extra-aesthetic calculations which had been steadily overwhelming all others long before the advent of a plausible digital alternative. At a certain rapidly approaching point (which may be coterminous with one or another existing “generation”–mine, for instance) the demand for printed, bound volumes will no longer be sufficient to make the printing and binding–and distribution–of them profitable. (It is more than possible that before this point is reached brick-and-mortar stores devoted to selling newly published books will have entirely disappeared. Book lovers are even rarer than readers. Most readers, I predict, will be untroubled by the loss of the attributes that Mr. Frost pleads for, and such readers have already been indoctrinated in the virtues of “planned obsolescence”–a concept that was still scandalous in the 1960s but which is now a consumer requirement. Mr. Frost laments a present that is already past:

Real book reading is also not intended to addict us to a consumerist agenda based on format obsolescence. The rush to the latest Kindle 1, Kindle 2, Kindle 3, i-Pad 1 and so on, always discarding the previous device, is a distraction from attentive reading and disruptive of library building. In the print environment small books and large books, cheap and pricy, visual and text formats have all proven sustainable together.