Those who live in Birmingham might this weekend hear the stamping of feet and clapping of hands coming from its magnificent new library.
Only a couple of months after its official opening, it is appropriate that the largest public library in Europe is holding a three-day conference entitled Resurrecting The Book. Some of us are still rejoicing that Birmingham has called its state-of-the-art building a library rather than a knowledge cafe, or a fact pod, or some such. The subject of this symposium cheeringly reinforces the idea that the city is putting itself in the front line of the fight for books of the old as well as the new sort.
Of the dozens of talks on offer many sound enticing. One that drew my eye was "Paranoic customers and dead bluebottles: why George Orwell was wrong about second-hand bookshops". Another is simply - perhaps sinisterly - called "Ties that bind: on ligatures". Best of all, perhaps, and the discussion whose conclusions I hope will have the audience on their feet and wolf-whistling is: "The quick and the dead: does the speed of digital signal the end of the material book?"
If the answer to that was yes, then there would probably be no conference, and not much of a library either. A few years ago, Arizona opened the world's first print-free library, but was obliged within a couple of years to start stocking ordinary books, because of public demand. Recently, a second attempt has been made at the e-book library, this time in San Antonio in Texas. Time will tell if its digital purity will be maintained. It's worth noting that the man behind this venture, San Antonio's former mayor, is an avid collector of first editions. He has yet to succumb to an e-reader, although he is thinking perhaps, one day, of borrowing one from the library to see what it's like.
Birmingham's conference is only one of dozens that have been and will continue to be held worldwide, as books and information change. The fast-rising profile of e-books makes it inevitable that people wonder if soon they will rule the print world, making paper editions redundant. Is the time coming when bound books will be locked behind glass as curiosities? Will future generations marvel over their design and illustrations as we now gasp at the Lindisfarne Gospels or at Chepman and Myllar's inky rag-paper books, the first to be published in Scotland?
I would not dare suggest this could never be the case. What one hopes will happen, and what does, are not always the same. But it seems to me that, in these infant days of digital books, readers remain ambivalent. A friend who bought an e-book was upset when the author turned up at her local library to give a talk, and she could not get it signed. Another so enjoyed the e-book she'd bought she then splashed out on the hardback, "to keep".
As someone who loves the physical book as an object, as well as by far the most convenient way yet devised to read, I take heart from the flurry of anxious discussion about its survival. I know many readers swear by the convenience of their digital books, and nobody can deny that they keep a house tidy and luggage light. Even so, I have heard from just as many who cannot imagine forsaking paper entirely. Sometimes, indeed, it's librarians who seem at the head of the charge towards the paper-free society. Those former custodians of serried ranks of spines have been seduced by the advantages of instantly updatable material, which does not require weight training or a wheelbarrow to reach their readers.
But for the majority of non-academic readers, or those not seeking up-to-the-minute facts, as the Library of Birmingham and others appreciate, reading is an intimate art, one in which a bond is created between the eye, the hand and the words on the page. So far, e-books have yet to equal that indefinable, lifelong relationship.
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