Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Joan Acocella has an article entitled “The Typing Life,” which is a review of Darren Wershler-Henry’s new book The Iron Whim, a history of the typewriter. The review is interesting in terms of the fact that typewriters (and keyboards themselves) — now nearly ubiquitous — were once seen as an alien and unwelcome intrusion in the history of literature. Or, as Acocella puts it, “Why would ordinary writers need a writing machine? They had pens.” The same is now being heard in the “print is dead” debate, except here is goes more like, “Why would ordinary readers need reading machines? They have books.” And while the truth of that statement seems self-evident (to booklovers, anyway) — the same way it did with typerwriters versus a pencil and a pad of paper a hundred years ago — what finally proved the tipping point in favor of the typewriter was the fact that it offered a better and more efficient way of working for writers. Because of this, it was finally adopted. True, many people at the time felt it was too difficult to break with tradition and their old habits, and shunned the typewriter (not to mention a small number of writers today feel the same way; both John Updike and J.K. Rowling still compose their books in longhand on notepads), but for the most part the introduction of the keyboard, along with the typewriter, revolutionized the way people write, think and communicate.

In the review, corrolaries to eBooks abound. For instance, Acocella writes that “there was no single moment of discovery, no lone inventor crying ‘Eureka!’ in a darkened laboratory. On the contrary, historians estimate that the typewriter was invented at least fifty-two times, as one tinkerer after another groped toward a usable design.” The same goes for eBooks, which have — even in their less-than-a-decade of existence — seen multiple formats, devices and business models. Acocella also touches upon the nature of technology, and how it can seem to import virtue in inanimate objects: “There was a mythology that what was typewritten was true, that the machine somehow caused writers to bare their souls.” There is the same notion today of printed books; that they’re sacred and divine, both untouchable and unimpeachable. (Which of course implies that the same text delivered any other way, i.e. on a computer screen, is somehow not true). And while the review is long-winded in the typical New Yorker kind of way (“The screen, a kind of indeterminate space, does not seem violable in the same way as the page”), Acocella gets at something at the heart of the “print is dead” debate through her look at the typerwriter’s past, and how it became our future.

The New Yorker: “The Typing Life”