Uh-oh, look at that cover.

It’s a meta-book, about books, and the title promises to make an argument for why they are important in the present age. Judging a book by it’s cover, I’d say we are going to talk about books that are plugged in - based on the white cords, perhaps an Apple Tablet, excepting of course the three USB ports. I grumble, but I can’t resist either.

Robert Darnton is author of many books, professor of history, and director of the Harvard University Library. The Case for Books collects essays and speeches on his area of interest, books, that were published between 1997 and 2009, with one exception which dates from 1982.

Rather than making a sustained narrative argument on “the case for books”, The Case for Books acts more as a case which contains books, or at least essays, and we are all better for it. The theme is that the best way to understand what is happening with books and publishing today is to look at their history. Each chapter is thoughtful and relevant and no one tries to tie them together with any supplementary text.

There is a lot to I could babble about in this book, so I’m just going to highlight the one thing most on my mind right now. This book is overdue.

In the late 90s, Darnton and the American Historical Association conceived of Gutenberg-e, a project designed to both enable newly minted PhDs to publish their theses and reinvent the genre of scholarly monographs at the same time.

As they conceived it, an electronic book didn’t have to have use a narrative approach because you can reorder the pages on the fly. A reader might choose to read an e-book more or less in-depth in different sections - say you are really into a research project’s methodology and the data produced, but you want to draw your own conclusions about the results:

The readers will download [the e-books], search the texts for whatever needs to be studied, print out the relevant sections, bind them in a machine attached to the printer, and take home for reading in the form of a custom-made paperback.

OH

This idea reminds me of some of the arguments I read last year about literacy, education, and the role of libraries. Michael Gorman, in The Enduring Library argues that more and more books are published each year, and Gunther Kress in Literacy in the New Media Age points out that many books being published are not meant to be read as narratives. Textbooks, children’s books, reference books, guidebooks, Books for Dummies, all are “books” but do not represent the kind “sustained reading of complex texts” that Gorman values.

One of Darnton and the AHA’s early challenges was that even if an academic press was willing to put out an e-book, authors and thesis advisers were reluctant to stray too far from the traditional form. Tenure is competitive, so don’t risk it. Dynamic hypertextuality is a great idea, but it makes your scholarly opus into something other than a book.

I am only a lame non-ebook-user, but it is my impression is that of the “real” e-books we read today on our Kindles and iTouches and Sony Readers, the genres most suited to the format, whether for ease of marketing or ease of reading, are narrative ones: fiction, literary non-fiction - and thinking of Nicholas and Anne-Marie’s presentation today, perhaps scholarly communication as well, at least for now.