The critic Carlin Romano, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, wonders if ten years hence books will be largely vestigial:
My own peculiar worry about Academe 2020, offered with less than 20/20 foresight, may seem less catastrophic: the death of the book as object of study, the disappearance of ?whole? books as assigned reading. Does that count as a preposterous figment of extreme academe, or is it closer than we think?
And he muses?on the worthiness of today's penchant for having everything published, everything archived:
But are we worse for not having archived the ephemera of mankind, for having devoted libraries and syllabi to books?the weightiest, most important, most enduring forms of communication? The old criterion of librarianship and pedagogy was right: Save and study the substantive, don't worry about the insignificant.
?Liam Julian