The Future of Books - The Collectible Future
There is much discussion about the "future of books". Opinions vary widely. The following article is both well written and interesting. I will include a few paragraphs here but suggest you will want to visit The Globe and Mail to read the entire article.
"The book may be doomed in the digital age, but a first edition of The Great Gatsby still costs $150,000.
In the waning years of the last century, Thomas Cahill scored an international success with How the Irish Saved Civilization. It wasn't about the brewing of the first pint of Guinness, but rather the story of how, in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire and the destructive rise of the Visigoths (“Aristotle? We don't need no stinking Aristotle!”), groups of plucky Irish monks in isolated monasteries “took on the great labour of copying Western literature – everything they could lay their hands on.”
Had it not been for these dedicated, flea-ridden scribes and the Catholic missionaries who then carried their works and words to Europe's scrofulous hordes, the world would have been entirely different. It would have been a world without … books!
Today, 550 years after Gutenberg's invention of mechanical movable type, not a few pundits believe we are on the verge of undoing what those Irish clerics did – that is, establishing a world without books."
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