SOURCE: A review of The Gutenberg Elegies, in Library Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1, January, 1996, pp. 105-06.

In the following review of The Gutenberg Elegies, Stevens evaluates Birkerts's insights on the act of reading in an electronic environment.

Technocrats are likely simply to reject the views expressed by Sven Birkerts in these fourteen challenging essays as being a Luddite love of the way things are. Old-fashioned librarians are likely simply to accept those views at face value or, worse, to quote excerpts that they may have read in a review to justify their continuing reluctance to deal with technology. That would be unfortunate, for in The Gutenberg Elegies he presents a carefully reasoned point of view of various aspects of reading, and not necessarily other forms of communication, and how the skills and techniques of reading are altered and changed in an electronic environment. All of us, and especially librarians...