[extropy-chat] Umberto Eco: In Defense of Vegetal Memory

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

>From Kuro5hin: Umberto Eco, the widely celebrated academic and novelist,
recently delivered a lecture, Vegetal and Mineral Memory: The Future of
Books, at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, which has been published in
its entirety by Al-Ahram Weekly.
Eco's lecture concerns an array of questions surrounding the future of books
in the age of hypertext and digital media: Will hypertext and the internet
eventually replace the traditional book? Do the literary possibilities
introduced by hypertext spell the end of books and authors as we currently
know them?
Eco concedes that, at least in the case of books which are designed to be
consulted rather than read -- dictionaries, encyclopaedias, reference
manuals, and the like -- books are likely to disappear over time, as digital
media offers numerous and compelling advantages.
In the case of books designed to be read rather than consulted--novels,
poems, essays, and the like -- Eco is rather more skeptical about the
eventual obsolescence of books as we know them; believing them to "belong to
those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further
improved because they are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife,
spoon or scissors."
Though Eco is one of my favorite authors, I definitely do not agree with him
on this point. It is true that today's e-books are not very convenient to
use compared to paper books, but this will change soon with better
technology. Today's scissors cut much better than last century's scissors. A
book remains a book regardless of the technology used to produce and use it.
See also this post of mine at Always On.
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