Neither paper books will disappear, nor libraries will be extinguished by the internet, nor librarians will be replaced by algorithms. This is the conclusion reached by historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen in the essay Libraries. A fragile history, where they predict a long life for these institutions full of fantastic stories.
“Physical libraries will survive, and the clearest example is the written press, which can now be read digitally but has not disappeared in paper form,” says the British author Pettegree.
This professor recalls that the change from scrolls to printed texts “was also revolutionary and there was also fear, but the reading capacity of the population increased, and now the Internet is not going to mean the death of the book, because people continue to buy the physical object and it is difficult to imagine libraries without books.”
Furthermore, this scholar reaffirms that institutions of this type that are merely digital are not working, nor are the electronic book as it already happened with the CD-ROM, and furthermore these public entities have a social function: “They have computers for the citizens and the staff of this paradise of books helps people in some cases to fill out administration forms with these computers.”
Communication requires making choices, but not necessarily binary ones; it is not about choosing between books or the Internet, or between newspapers or radio, Pettegree points out, because “people are capable of appreciating what is useful to us in the new, preserving what is useful to us in the old.”
Pettegree and Der Weduwen, both from the University of Saint Andrews, had previously written a research on the culture of books and the invention of the printing press in Germany and with that experience they saw the importance that private libraries played throughout history.
Of the 2.6 million institutional libraries on the planet, only about 404,000 are publicly owned.
A cultured origin
Initially, libraries were “a space for educated people, but over time the content of books has changed and they have become more accessible to the general public.” The authors detect two important changes in their evolution in the ancient world: “Papyrus and parchment were a very good medium because they were very cheap, but they degraded very quickly, until the Middle Ages, when they moved on to another medium that was much more durable but more expensive, paper, which allowed reading to expand.”
In the manuscript age, notable people began collecting books, and when the printing press arrived in 1450, it was cheap enough that scholars, priests, lawyers, and doctors could join this group of collectors.
The printing press, the authors continue, meant that reading reached all strata of society in the 18th and 19th centuries, although they warn: “It is paradoxical that it took 400 years from the invention of the printing press until the first law on public libraries was approved.”
