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Preface (2014) by Robert Darnton
The "First Steps" toward a history of reading that I described in AJFS twenty-eight years ago have now turned into something of a stampede. They lead in many directions-so many that I cannot map them here. The excellent anthology edited by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, A History of Reading in the West (English edition, Polity Press, 1999) surveys much of the ground covered by the end of the century. But the twentieth century already looks like the distant past.
Why so near and yet so far? The answer, in a word, or rather an acronym, is WWW: the World Wide Web, which came into existence in 1991 and has already transformed reading for millions of people. To be sure, we may exaggerate the change, because we are living in the middle of it. The printed codex is far from dead. In fact, more books are now being published than ever before. In 2012 the number of titles produced in the United States increased by six per cent, and the increase was much greater in developing countries such as Brazil and China. It comes in the form of books composed of printed paper, books to be read by turning pages rather than by scrolling, as the ancients had done before the invention of the codex at the beginning of the common era and as moderns do today when they read texts on computers. Having survived two thousand centuries, the codex will probably continue far into the future. And yet...
Yet readers everywhere sense that reading is being revolutionized. They sense it through the tips of their fingers when they touch electronic screens - a Fingerspitzengefühl unlike the tactility of books held in one's hands. They hear it with the click that takes them instantly from one text to another. They see it as they connect cursors with icons and when they search for information stored in clouds rather than libraries. The physical foundation of texts and the sensory experience of deciphering them are undergoing a transformation greater than anything since the time of Gutenberg.
I think it can be called a "revolution". The word is often overused. In "First Steps Toward a History of Reading", I objected to its overuse...