The Last Book
A. Michael Knoll, Annenberg School for Communication

The Internet has revolutionized the way information is distributed. This revolution is extending to education and to publishing, completely reforming these institutions and industries. Downloading of books and electronic publishing over the Internet are growing in application. If these trends continue, we will soon witness the publication of the last book distributed on paper!

Books and paper have had a long history. The Egyptians invented papyrus about 3000 B.C., originally using it in long rolls. The Gutenberg bible of 1450 is generally acknowledged as the first book printed with movable metal type, although the Chinese were using movable characters for the printing of books hundreds of years earlier. The composing of type was facilitated greatly by Megenthaler's invention of the linotype machine in 1796. Today, computers are used to compose nearly all publications that are printed on paper, or on any other medium, for that matter. Hence, the text is fully captured in computer form from the very beginning of its creation. This ultimately could be the deal knell of the paper book.

Today, books, magazines, and newspapers are still mostly printed on paper by printing presses and then distributed physically. Instruction manuals for software are rarely distributed on paper anymore and instead are distributed mostly on a CD or by downloading from a Web site. The manual that is printed on paper is becoming a relic of the past. Next in line to extinction could be newspapers and magazines.

Specific information is much easier to access and obtain over the Internet. For reasons that are a mystery to me, the current editions of many newspapers are available for free over the Internet, but stories from past newspapers in the archive are sold. In the minds of newspaper publishers, old news is more valuable than new news. Newsletters are already distributed primarily over the intemet. Trade magazines, then regular magazines, and finally newspapers will follow the trend as paper?based versions vanish into extinction. Last in line could be books.

Books will die a hard death. Many people still love the physical look, feel, and smell of a fresh book. It is still wonderful to curl up on the sofa with a book to read. A CRT does not fit on my lap, and most laptop computers are still far from that ideal, although the AppleT iBookT computer with its rounded comers and smooth shape is in the right direction. Some books are being printed on demand after being ordered over the Internet and are then physically delivered. The next step is transmission over the Internet, either for printing on paper on your printer or for reading on a screen as a soft copy. From there, it is a small step to the last book printed on paper. Or is it?
At my school, a room of 40 computers is jammed day and night with students working away at the machines. Is this a glimpse of the
future: namely, scholars and students doing their research at computers, with no need for libraries containing old-fashioned books? But this same room is also reminiscent of the old typing pool of the distant past, where menial typing was performed on a large scale at one central place. Yesteryear's typists or tomorrow's scholars? A visitor from a distant universe would be hard pressed to tell.

Scholarly research seems to have become typing key words into a search engine and then clicking on the Web sites that result. Writing has become a matter of cutting and pasting. Yet if the material is before 1990, it is not on the Web. Nor is it on the Web if it is only on paper. Thus archives and libraries of paper books and scholarly materials remain the only preservation of history and the past. That is until all the world's knowledge has been placed on the Web-whenever that might occur, if ever.

So the book might well be around for decades more. Books and paper-based reference materials are a record of the past. Highlighting and underlining are far easier on paper than on a computer screen. Yet I worry about the hundreds of students in the computer room for whom scholarship has become clicking on Web sites and cutting and pasting.

© 2001 A. Michael Noll All rights reserved.