This clip, about a Luddite monk’s discovery of the book, has been circulating YouTube. How do you use it? If you close this ‘book’, will all the text inside be saved, or will
it just disappear? Plus ça change…
On a separate but related point, there was a particularly well-documented case of a vanishing text in 2009. Following an ownership dispute, Amazon erased George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four from the Kindle, and all the users’ annotations. Readers could appreciate the irony, if little else. This was a vanishing act worthy of Airstrip One.
For a whole text to disappear like that is a rare hiccup, but to lose a single word or part of a text during digitization is a constant danger. Just how many scanned books, for example, are
unintentionally missing a page, or have pages reproduced upside down or back to front, or contain chance typos? Long dead authors must be chuckling in their graves as modern readers pick over
apparent inconsistencies in their text: ‘In line 429 of the MSS the author writes of one horse. In line 432 ‘horse’ is rendered in the plural. Now, the horse was described at line
37 as ‘heavy’ but also ‘fertile’. It is probable therefore that the horse has given birth at some point between lines 429 and 432, which explains the presence of two horses
in 432.’ QED. Because, of course, a copyist’s error would be too ridiculous an explanation.
As texts become further and further removed from their original source, the scope for error grows ever more acute. The human error of the medieval manuscript copyists may now be diminished, but
technology is hardly foolproof, especially as ever more intricate devices are introduced and transfers made. The academics of 3011 will have plenty to quibble about in whichever texts come down to
them, in whichever form they do.
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