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  • The Rise of the Confident Reader
  • Christopher S. Leslie (bio)
Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II. By John B. Hench. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010. 320 pages. $35.00 (cloth).
Expanding the American Mind: Books and the Popularization of Knowledge. By Beth Luey. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. 324 pages. $80.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper).
Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. By Jim Collins. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. 300 pages. $79.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper).

Twenty years ago, it seemed possible that hypertext would instigate a transition to a paperless society and, perhaps, dethrone the authorities that had been selecting the words for the paper. In 1992 Robert Coover's essay "The End of Books" suggested that hypertext would subsume existing print materials, leaving only new media in the future. Coover noted that the novel—thought to be "the virulent carrier of the patriarchal, colonial, canonical, proprietary, hierarchical and authoritarian values of a past that is no longer with us"—derives its despotic power from the rigid sequence of pages, whereas hypertext empowers readers to choose their own paths.1 In 1995, the same year as the initial public offering of Netscape that marked the beginning of the age of the Web, Nicholas Negroponte proposed the concept of the "Daily Me" to replace newspapers. Instead of having to wade through what editors and publishers asserted are the day's top stories, Negroponte predicted that a reader would use new media to collect the information he or she wants.2

Today, one would expect to see old media receding behind the pressure of the new. To the contrary, while commuting and in public places, one sees people reading paper books—and linear books on their electronic devices—but it is harder to find someone exercising his or her authority by assembling a narrative out of a discontinuous hypertext. Even so, the reign of the despotic novel seems to have come to an end: not through authors' elimination of linear narratives [End Page 1051] but through readers' refusal to venerate them. As Jim Collins notes, the most striking characteristic of the reading public of the early twenty-first century has been that casual readers feel empowered to take on books for pleasure that once were the province of professional readers. Today, culture with a capital C is something that individuals tag on Facebook and load onto portable devices along with games.

A casual observer might have thought that print books would be overpowered by hypertext versions because they are better, faster, cheaper, or more flexible. That none of the above has been the determining factor in the new culture of reading demonstrates the fallacy of technological determinism. Media devices are simply tools, and the history of technology teaches us that there is nothing intrinsic in a tool that effects a definite and inevitable change on society. Tools are cultural objects and so they do not determine social structures; instead, they reflect the cultural assumptions of the society that creates them. In times of media transition, a new medium is more likely to replicate the practices of what it seeks to replace, not revolutionize the audience. With this in mind, it should be clear that the culture of the autonomous, independent reader is an ideology that new media have inherited from the old.

Together, John Hench's Books as Weapons, Beth Luey's Expanding the American Mind, and Jim Collins's Bring on the Books for Everybody help explain why books have not been so easy for new media to displace. Coming out at the same time, these authors could not cite each other; nevertheless, as a trio, they help us understand the national infrastructure behind the diffusion of words and images that supported the rise of the casual reader. Because this casual reader is tied to a network of publishers and national institutions, this trio also helps us to be mindful of the cultural inertia propelling books into the age of the Web. Instead of eliminating books, new media have been enlisted successfully in an...

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