"the Twilight of the Printed Book."

[John K]

I’m interested in the intellectual snobbery I find in George R. Stewart’s “Earth Abides” and have been looking for information on Stewart’s intent regarding the character of “Ish”.

I came across a transcription of a long oral interview owned by The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. The copyright is 1972. They give permission for excepts and I thought some here might find this part interesting.

Riess:
There's an article that I haven't read, and.wish I
had, in your bibliography, from the pacific Spectator,
called "the Twilight of the Printed Book." what were
you saying in 1949 about the twilight of the printed
book?

Stewart :
I was a little premature, But things are moving that
way, gradually, My idea was that the book as we know
it was not the last or permanent word. in the transmittal
of information and art, Such things as microfilm,
microcards, and reproductions of that sort offered
tremendous possibilities and might easily replace the
printed book. There are signs that that is happening.

Riess:
You were ahead of your time, That's what's happening
now.

Stewart :
Slowly, I didn’t give it enough time, That's one of
the great faults of prophecy. You should always give
it about twice as much time as you think, to start
with.

Riess:
You mean you had said within twenty years?

Stewart :
Twenty-five years or something like that. It isn't
working out that way, The codex is a very convenient
thing, My idea was that you could sit here, for
instance, and have your book thrown on the wall there,
in letters four inches high. Just sit here and read
it, and you could press a button and move it, and so
forth, You wouldn't need to hold the book.

Riess:
You wouldn't even have to have a book. It could be
just beamed from headquarters.

Stewart :
That would be possible too. Or you could have a
projector right here. It's working that way, There's
a tremendous project now, of a whole library, 29,000
volumes or so, on one shelf. That kind of miniprint.

Of course I was conceiving it not merely as a
way of preserving material efficiently, but actually
as a way of transmitting it to the reader. The
emphasis has all been on the preserving of material,
and it hasn't been on making it available. But
actually, most people think of microfilm, which was
an invention of the devil. Reading microfilm is just
awful.

But that's so primitive. There's no reason why
they couldn't have something vastly better. You could
have oral books, too. As I pointed out in this
article, you could have a machine under your pillow,
instead of now, as you try to read in bed, you have
to put something around you, and sit up, and when you
want to go to sleep you have to take all this stuff
off, and turn out the light and throw the pillow away
somewhere, and it's a terrible nuisance. [laughter]
I never do it. If you could just have this thing
reading to you, lie on the pillow and have it reading
to you, then when you went to sleep, your heartbeat
would change, and it would turn off.

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/...art_george.pdf