Looking at Books by John Sutherland – essay

The sexy thing this summer, as the TV ads tell us, is the e-book. Forget those old 1,000-page blockbusters, two of which would put you over Mr Ryan’s weight limit. Sand, sun, surf — and Kindle. The traditional ‘beach book’ is as obsolete as the Victorian bathing machine.

The printed codex has had a long run — it is half a millennium since William Caxton set up his stall around St Paul’s. Few inventions have lasted as long, or done as much good for humanity. But a tipping point has been reached for the ink, paper and board product. More precisely, it will be tipped into the waste-bin of history. Goodbye Gutenberg.

I love mooching round the shelves of the London Library, which proudly refuses to ‘deaccession’ any book it has acquired over the last 150 years. I have run up a quite sizeable bill in canine damage with them since my schnauzer insists on chewing volumes I’ve borrowed (always an embarrassing moment at the counter — ‘the dog ate my book’). Like me she’s particularly fond of Victorian fiction. Why? Because thousands of human hands (and, one fears, the occasional bespittled finger) have touched them and left their olfactory residue. Coat my iPad an inch thick with foie gras and Frieda wouldn’t be interested in the machine underneath. I feel much the same when, as sometimes it’s too inconvenient not to, I use Gutenberg.org, with its quarter of a million free and downloadable ‘texts’. It doesn’t, as the song says, have the same thrill as a book whose pages Virginia Woolf herself may have fingered.

Looked at objectively, e-books are suffering a bad case of techno-embarrassment. They do everything they can to look, on the screen, reassuringly like what they are in fact ousting from our lives.