'The Book That Contains All Books'

Stephen Marche's superb essay in this past weekend's Wall Street Journal, "The Book That Contains All Books," offered a novel perspective on the rise of the electronic book, comparing its importance to what he considers the two major historical inflection points in reading: first, the change from scrolls to bound books and second, the advent of the printing press.

Excerpts follow.

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On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text.

Most literate people are familiar with at least some of the consequences of the print revolution of the 15th century, but far fewer are as aware of the much more profound change that occurred when rolls were replaced by codices—pages bound between covers—in the late Roman period. Think of the scattered, tattered remainders of the Dead Sea Scrolls—each text is isolated and vulnerable. Codices were originally mini-libraries, much more useful and easy than storing masses of loose individual texts.

The development of the codex was a shift from thinking of literature as a unique object, like a painting, to seeing it as an institutional object. Conversely, as the codex came to dominate as a means of intellectual transmission, the scroll began to take on the status of a holy object, which is why synagogues keep the Torah in scrolls.

The introduction of the printing press brought a similarly enormous change to the nature of reading.

My paper library consists of 2,000 volumes, making it both much too big and much too small. I consider a working library to have about 5,000 volumes, but a mere 2,000 has been sufficient to be one of the most continuous problems of my life. Moving it around is a nightmare. A hundred boxes of books is a terrible burden in the 21st century. Yet I know that I will never get rid of them. I'm too attached now. Just as the ancients respected the scroll more after the development of the book, just as the hand-written manuscript became sacred after the invention of print, the printed book is now beginning to glow with its own obsolescence.

But I am immensely excited for the new phase of the book.... In literary terms it's a transbook, by which I mean that it is the book which can contain all books. Why are so many writers so afraid of this staggeringly wonderful possibility? A book is a singular object that can contain many voices, but the transbook has the potential to be a singular object containing all voices. It is not just another kind of media; it is the dream of ultimate text.

We are still in early days, but it is obvious where the transbook is headed: It will eventually provide access to all text that is non-copyright, and to the purchase of every book in or out of "print."

... It's about what the book wants to be. And the book wants to be itself and everything. It wants to be a vast abridgment of the universe that you can hold in your hand. It wants to be the transbook.

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Below,

The Dead Sea Scrolls.