E-readers and the death of the book: Or, new media and the myth of the disappearing medium

Abstract

The recent emergence of e-readers and e-books has brought the death of the book to the centre of current debates on new media. In this article, we analyse alternative narratives that surround the possibility of the disappearance of print books, dominated by fetishism, fears about the end of humanism, and ideas of techno-fundamentalist progress. We argue that, in order to comprehend such narratives, we need to inscribe them in the broader history of media. The emergence of new media, in fact, has often been accompanied by narratives about the possible disappearance of older media: the introduction of television, for instance, inspired claims about the forthcoming death of film and radio. As a recurrent narrative shaping the reception of media innovation, the myth of the disappearing medium helps us to make sense of the transformations that media change provokes in our everyday life.

How NOT to create a digital media scholarship platform: the history of the Sophie 2.0 project

“…I build on Ballatore and Natale's work on the cultural implications of what they call 'the myth of the death of the book' and agree that "Such prophecies, however, are revealing of the way societies regard media as vehicles for change -precisely because they are embedded in the idea of the future." (Ballatore and Natale, 2016). I agree with Evgeny Morozov, in his work To Save Everything Click Here that the Internet needs to be studied not as a "McLuhanesque 'medium'" or the bringer of a unique epoch in human history and instead placed in a greater context (Morozov, 2013).…”

“…Sophie 2.0 is but a chapter in the long and troubled history of e-books and e-book platforms. While the idea of the e-book can be found earlier in computer history, in their article about the history of the idea of e-books resulting in the end of the print book, Ballatore and Natale describe how "The development of the actual idea of the e-book is principally attributed to Andries van Dam, who coined the term working on a hypertext system in 1967, and Michael Hart, who founded Project Gutenberg in 1971" and describe how early attempts at e-books were hindered by the size and limits of computers of the 60s and 70s (Ballatore and Natale, 2016). In his article "A Call to Embrace Social Reading in Higher Education" business professor Matthew Dean describes how "In a hard-copy version of a book, one can highlight sentences, annotate in the margins, bookmark important pages, keep the book in a revered spot on a bookshelf, loan it to friends, discuss your favorite parts with others who have read the book, etc."…”

“…The story of Hypercard shows that similar programs to allow non-programmers to create interactive multimedia documents had been tried before in the closed source world with limited success. Moreover, Ballatore and Natale in their discussion of the history of e-books indicate how early attempts at e-readers during the 1990s were considered a failed technology and did not survive the dot-com burst (Ballatore and Natale, 2016). While of course the technology was much more limited, it does show that multimedia e-books and e-book creators were never popular.…”

Unveiling the Biographies of Media: On the Role of Narratives, Anecdotes, and Storytelling in the Construction of New Media's Histories

“…Biological and experiential events such as birth, maturity, aging, and death often enter in narrative constructions through which we attempt to make sense of media change (Acland, 2007;Ballatore & Natale, 2015;Gaudreault & Marion, 2005). Moreover, media historians have sometimes tended to conflate the actual biographies of living humans, such as inventors, with the technologies they became most closely associated with (e.g.…”

“…Why do narratives about the death of media, despite their failure to describe the actual dynamics of media change, continue to characterize biographies of media and, more broadly, our perception and representation of the dynamics through which new media are introduced and older media change? As argued elsewhere (Ballatore & Natale, 2015), what made the narrative of the death of media so persistent is that they provide us with a familiar pattern to describe and domesticate the transformations brought by the introduction of new media in our everyday life and experience. It is important to consider that the introduction of new media ─such as, for instance, smart phones and e-readers in our time, or television in the 1950s─ challenge established habits and expectations in our everyday life (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011).…”