Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

A colleague and fellow writer recently sent me a number of passages from The Stone Gods, Jeanette Winterson’s recent novel. The book has a section set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic (and post-print) world. In fact, the quotes below remind me very much of Bradbury’s dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451.

From The Stone Gods, page 49:

“We were flying in a strange part of the sky,” said Handsome, “and we thought we’d hit a meteorite shower, ship spinning like a windsock in a gale. I took a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree shot of the ship, and I saw that what we were flying through was a bookstorm–encyclopedias, dictionaries, a Uniform Edition of the Romantic poets, the complete works of Shakespeare.”

From The Stone Gods, page 162:

Books had been lost like everything else in the War, and Post-3 War we hadn’t returned to print media. Natural wastage was the economic argument: why go back to something that was on the way out anyway? You can order books from Print on Demand, but most people use Digital Readers now, or don’t read at all. The younger kids have never known book culture so they don’t miss it.

From The Stone Gods, page 164:

I had been in the British Library, researching the history of artificial intelligence. It was the books that saved my life. As the building collapsed I fell on to a raft of books, and stacks of books fell on to me, knocking me unconscious but casing me from further damage. I came round, pushed myself out of the mountain of books, and started to walk home through the blasted streets, in shock, aware, somewhere, that people were running and screaming, and that everywhere, like one of those archive films of detonated demolitions, buildings were falling.

I think these are great quotes, and the predictions feel very real given all that we’re going through right now.