The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (review)

This volume, consisting of eleven journalistic pieces (all but one dating from between 1997 and 2009), shows Darnton in his recently adopted role as public commentator on issues involved in the electronic publication of new verbal works and the mass digitization of previously published books. He first became a widely known historian in 1979 with the appearance of The Business of Enlightenment, a study of the archival records of the firm that printed Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1751-80). Darnton's book was one of the earliest English-language contributions to the now flourishing field called "book history," which aims to assess the role of printed matter in social and cultural history. (The one essay in the present volume that seems out of place with the others is his controversial 1982 attempt to define book history in terms of a diagram of "the entire communication process.") Although he has continued to produce scholarly works, he is now known by a larger audience for his pieces in the New York Review of Books, especially those on the desirability of a "national digital library" and the problems raised by Google's ambition to create what would amount to such a library. There is much to admire in Darnton's general position. He welcomes the great benefits of electronic texts; and he has been in a position (as president of the American Historical Association in 1999 and director of Harvard University Library since 2007) to argue forcefully for "electronic publishing as a legitimate form of communicating knowledge." To further this goal, he founded "Gutenberg-e" (a program for publishing some dissertations electronically) and is involved in "Open Access" (an initiative, at Harvard and elsewhere, to make more faculty articles accessible on the Internet)—both of which are discussed in this book. He can be a strong advocate for a vast digital library and at the same time recognize that "one medium does not displace another" and that a building containing printed books "still deserves to stand at the center of the campus." The latter point rests on an understanding not only of the fragility of digital files but also of the important physical evidence (for textual and book-production history and the history of reading) that can be extracted from the printed books themselves.

Yet the message is sometimes unclear, for the historical value of the physical originals is not a presence in every discussion, and at some points one cannot help recalling Darnton's notorious belittling of physical analysis (as opposed to archival research) in the introduction to his 1979 book. In the 1982 essay included here, for instance, he says that the bewildering growth of the field of book history is "enough to make one want to retire to a rare-book room and count watermarks." But watermark study is not mindless escape; its value as a vital technique of book history should be obvious to one who recognizes, as he does elsewhere, the contribution made by such analogous practices as examining the recurrences of identifiable types. A related example is his assertion (in a 2008 essay) that "the strongest argument for the old-fashioned book is its effectiveness for ordinary readers." To defend books in this way, giving top billing to their appeal to readers (a subjective matter), neglects the bibliographical evidence that only the books themselves can provide (an unquestionable fact).

One can extrapolate from Darnton's book, if one reads all of it carefully, parts of the basic rationale for the continuing value of printed books from the past (that is, the original objects containing texts that were not "born digital"). But because this rationale does not emerge clearly and fully at any point, I shall summarize it in seven sentences, as follows. Any discussion of the digitization of texts originally published in printed form must recognize the essential point that digitizations are subject to the disadvantages inherent in the derivative status of all reproductions. Despite their great convenience for some...