Reflection 11: The Supposed Demise of the Printed Word

With every new technology, people always herald the death of the Written Word. And so far, they have been wrong.The radio didn’t kill print. The audiobook didn’t kill print. The internet didn’t kill print. The kindle or the iPad didn’t kill print. Ebooks didn’t kill print. With every advancement, books still stick around, still on shelves and still being sold, showing no signs of ever leaving.

I think this is because there is something within humans which makes the act of holding and reading written words inherently pleasurable. Something about turning each and every page, feeling the paper, seeing the pages flip on by.

Even if this weren’t true, would the loss of physical books change anything? Stories would still be published. Novels and texts would still be read. Man would still write and people would still read. There’s no possible way that humans would stop reading, even if they shifted interests away from what some might call “higher literature”.

In fact, the transfer of word from analog to digital may cause a “writing boom”. Already, there’s at least one story being published every minute of every day. With an increase in online publishing, the costs of vanity and self publishing could decrease causing an even higher rate of new books to be published. More people could realize that being published is not as hard as it once was. Human knowledge and expression could boom in a “Writing Rush” akin to the obsession with gold in the Gold Rush.

The loss of the written word, while nearly impossible, may in fact increase readership and writing.