No More Printed Britannica

Most Americans have probably already learned that earlier this month Encyclopedia Britannica announced that the current printed edition of the encyclopedia will be the final one. Mr. Google will point you to a host of news articles and commentary (like this one from the blog of The New Yorker).

Britannica is neither the first nor the last familiar encyclopedia to abandon the codex for the computer. The rationale for digitizing time-sensitive reference works like encyclopedias is ever more irresistable, and it’s hard to argue with the sheer ecological argument of refusing to fell additional trees for subsequent editions of an encyclopedia that’s required numerous revisions since it was first published in (wait for it:) 1768.

Still, we felt it somehow necesssary to register here at the Booklover’s Blog this heartbreaking-if-inevitable turning point in the history of the book, if only because for many bibliophiles, perusing (in addition to referring to) Britannica is among the fondest memories of our early reading careers.

Britannica’s nostalgic value among readers (well, readers of a certain age, perhaps) is so strong that we predict that booklovers (and second-hand bookstore owners) are going to be snarfing them up from library book sales any time a public library divests itself of whatever edition it happens to own. (Lucky the booksale browser who stumbles upon a discarded set of the highly-regarded 11th (1911) edition!)

In any case, the death of the printed Britannica feel like another omen of the End of An Era (in this case, the Gutenberg one). Let us hope the marketing gods keep the licensing fees for the Britannica’s electronic versions within the range of public library budgets.

4/18/2012 Postscript: Britannica put together this nifty compilation of the media coverage of its announcement:

Bookish Poem du Jour

Today’s featured poem at The Writer’s Almanac is Joyce Sutphen’s “Bookmobile.”

Dept. of “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”

“Library After an Air Raid, London, 1940″ (photographer unidentified)

Found at A Work in Progress

Project Gutenberg Founder Michael Hart Dies at 63

Michael Stearn Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and inventor of the electronic book, died this week at age 63.

The importance of Project Gutenberg to the history – and to the future – of books would be difficult to overemphasize.

Librarians, archivists, and computer-owning bibliophiles have Hart to thank for his visionary project to enlist the aid of thousands of volunteers around to globe to eventually digitize (and proofread) the texts of every copyright-free book ever published – and make these e-books available to anyone free of charge. (Hart launched his project before Google and Amazon.com decided they’d try something similar as a way of making money off the idea.)

Hart’s obituary is here. Wikipedia’s entry about Project Gutenberg is here.

Found via Shelf Awareness

“Americans Don’t Burn Books”

An editorial by James Cannon Boyce, posted to Salon.

(Although I remember a Florida minister threatening to burn a copy of the Koran, I hadn’t heard that there are people planning to do this on the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks.)

“Biblionecrophilia”?

Are print book lovers beginning to fetishize The Printed Word?

Read about this and other well-expressed ideas in this quick survey of The-Book-is-Dead phenomenon published last month by the Los Angeles Times Review of Books, and written by author and professor Ben Ehrenreich.

Found via PhiloBiblos

The Book as Shape-Shifter

Today’s Bookish Quote is from Ben Ehrenreich’s “The Death of the Book,” an essay posted to the preview issue of the soon-to-be-officially-launched Los Angeles Review of Books:

“All of our words for book refer, at root, to forms no longer recognizable as such: biblos being the Greek word for the pith of the papyrus stalk (on which texts in the Greco-Roman world were inscribed); libri being Latin for the inner bark of a tree, just as the Old English bóc and Old Norse bók referred to the beech tree. Likewise “tome” is from a Greek word for a cutting (of papyrus) and “volume” is from the Latin for a rolled-up thing — a scroll, which is the form most texts took until they were replaced by folded parchment codices. Prior to the late 13th century, when paper was first brought to Europe from China, the great works of Western civilization were recorded on the skins of animals. The Inca wrote by knotting strings. The ancient Chinese scrawled calligraphy on cliffs. (Do mountains count as books?) The printed, paper book, as we know it, dates only to the mid-fifteenth century, but those early Gutenberg exemplars were hardly something you’d curl up with on a rainy Sunday afternoon. The book as an affordable object of mass production — as something directly kin to the books that line our shelves — was not born until the 19th century, just in time for the early announcements of its death.”

Found via The Second Pass

The Booklover’s Debt to Ye Irish

As Irish history expert Thomas Cahill reminded New York Times readers on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, all bookloving people are beholden to the post-medieval scribes of Ireland for preserving the classics of Western civilization. Read Cahill’s op-ed in yesterday’s Times.

Contributed by local bibliophile Franklin Abbott