SOURCE: "'The Fate of the Book,'" in The Antioch Review, Vol. 54, No. 3, Summer, 1966, pp. 261-72.

In the following essay, Birkerts speculates about the implications of (he transition from page-centered (book) to screen-centered (on-line) communication in contemporary society.

I would need the fingers of both hands to track how many times this past year I have been asked to give my thoughts on something called "the fate of the book." I have sat on symposia, perched on panels, opined on-line, and rattled away on the radio—not once, it seems, addressing the fate of reading, or literacy, or imagination, but always that other thing: the fate of the book. Which would be fine, really, except that the host or moderator never really wants to talk about the book—the artifact, the bundle of bound pages—or even much about the class of things to which it belongs. That...