For the time being, the idea that the book is dead seems to be in remission. Two decades have passed since we found ourselves suddenly living in an age of endings — the end of history, the death of God, the end of ideology, the demise of the novel, the bonfire of the vanities, the death of the book, and so on.
As if in agreement with these proposed finalities, seemingly impregnable communist regimes toppled. The Berlin wall, both as symbol and physical presence, came crashing down. And then not only the years but also the century and the whole bloody millennium ended.
It was an orgasm of closure, to use the word that then invaded the language like a virus.
With unseemly haste the death of the book was assumed to be part of this cascade of conclusion. The book was and remains self-evidently not dead. People are crowding bookshops. Week by week books are reviewed, cited, paraphrased, recommended, criticised, attacked, blamed for this, rewarded for that, compared here, convicted there, exonerated somewhere else.
Readers have no sense that they are dealing in moribund goods. They do not catch the whiff of lexicological death as they turn a page. Proponents of book death continue to forecast doom, but at the moment the book is down at the gym doing circuits and looking fit.
If the book does have a cast-iron future appointment on boot hill, what is to be its replacement? Answer: the e-book — for the moment on screen, but that will change.
Few people have read or are inclined to read whole books on screen. So where does the perfectly acceptable enthusiasm for the e-book come from? Not from people whose experience of e-book reading has convinced them of its superiority, because there are so far very few such people. And not from those who are hanging out to change over to e-books as soon as they can. No such anticipatory mood seems to exist.
The enthusiasm for the e-book and all its advantages comes from people who are already enthusiasts for something larger than the e-book, from people who have an umbrella enthusiasm under which e-publishing takes its place as only one of many marvels. This enthusiasm is for the technology itself.
Just as it was not mainly cricket lovers who espoused the technology that now suffuses the venerable game, so it has not been