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The Oxford Companion to the Book
Edited by Michael F Suarez SJ and Henry Woudhuysen
Oxford £195, 2 vols, 1,408 pages
FT Bookshop price: £175

The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future
By Robert Darnton
PublicAffairs £13.99, 240 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.19

Reading Matters: Five Centuries of Discovering Books
By Margaret Willes
Yale £12.99, 304 pages

The Book in the Renaissance
By Andrew Pettegree
Yale £30, 450 pages

The demise of the venerable codex, or bound book, has been predicted at least since 1899, when HG Wells in The Sleeper Awakes envisaged the entire corpus of human literature reduced to a mini-library of “peculiar double cylinders” that would be viewable on a screen. More informed commentators have been arguing since the computer became domesticised in the 1980s that it would herald the end of print but, each time, the predicted end of days has rolled around with no sign of an apocalypse. As the joke goes, books are still cheap, robust and portable, and the battery life is great.

Most of us are in no hurry to see them go. This week the UK’s early version of World Book Day rolls around with its freight of £1 children’s books (the rest of the world gets around to it on April 23). Meanwhile, Oxford has just launched upon the public its lavish Companion to the Book, a vast work of reference seven years in the making in which some 400 scholars chart the forms that books have taken since mankind began scratching out characters.

But it seems reasonable to think that change is afoot. At the time of writing, an American court is in the process of reconsidering the settlement that Google reached with the Authors Guild in 2008, allowing the company to digitise thousands of books, including many still in copyright. The case has caused heated debate – court documents this week revealed that more than 6,500 authors, many well-known, have decided to opt out of the Google settlement. The case continues: its outcome promises to transform the way in which we view and access information. If Google has its way, one of the world’s largest companies will end up with unchallenged distribution rights over one of the world’s largest book collections.

Meanwhile, Apple is next month releasing its iPad, the hand-held tablet that it hopes will trample underfoot Amazon’s popular Kindle reader, along with similar products from competitors such as Sony and IREX, to make books on a computer an everyday experience. The pre-launch agreements that Apple hammered out with five big publishers were responsible for January’s spat between Amazon and Macmillan, in which America’s largest online retailer was forced to cave in to a publisher’s demands by halting its loss-leader policy on e-book sales. Further agreements with textbook publishers are rumoured to be imminent and whoever first proposes an affordable way of rolling out e-books in schools stands a good chance of dictating the future of the medium.

Affordable e-readers, viable models for electronic publishing and distribution and the prospect of a worldwide “library without walls”: it sounds like a glimpse of the future. As the next stage in the evolution of the book becomes visible, the concomitant wealth of catalogues, digitised collections, interlinked databases and search engines allow an unprecedented degree of historical penetration. As historian Andrew Pettegree points out: “We can for the first time chart a coherent narrative of print, from the first experiments of the 1450s to the dawn of a mass information society.”

Certain questions seem pressing. Are the problems of the information age distinct in nature, as well as in appearance, from those facing publishers of the past? In our rush to collapse library walls and democratise learning under the banner of accessible information, do we risk destroying a long tradition of archivism and scholarship? And what can we learn about the likely development of reading by studying its past?

The Case for Books, a collection of essays by book historian Robert Darnton, attempts to shed light on several of these questions. After a career that began in journalism, progressed to academia and continued into publishing, Professor Darnton is now director of the Harvard University library. Under his direction, the library suspended its partnership with Google in 2008, citing fears that the company’s plans to continue digitising copyrighted books would lead to a monopoly of information.

The Case for Books collects work published over nearly 30 years in journals that range from The New York Review of Books to Daedalus and the Harvard Crimson. It includes an influential essay from 1999 on the future of the electronic book, in which Darnton enthusiastically envisaged a pyramid-shaped resource tree of deepening complexity, where one browses information on a computer screen, then prints out the appropriate texts to consult between covers. A sort of cross between a wiki, a microfilm library and Blackwell’s Espresso Book Machine, it formed an important theoretical model as electronic books developed but looks decreasingly likely to be the way forward.

Darnton also devotes much of the book’s first part to setting out his reasoned objections to the Google judgment, arguments that are built on scholarly scruples rather than partisan preference. Public institutions, in his view, are better guardians of knowledge than companies with shareholders to please. The form of libraries may change but they should, he says, remain libraries and not corporations: “Libraries were never warehouses of books ... They have always been and always will be centres of learning.”

Part of the delight of Darnton’s book is his adept grasp of how history repeats itself. He has the scholarly nous to show that worries about books and reading habits extend back far further than the information age. His introduction quotes the Italian scholar Niccolò Perotti, writing with asperity to his friend in 1471 about “this new kind of writing which was recently brought to us from Germany”: Gutenberg’s black-letter type. “Even when they write something worthwhile,” Perotti complained, “they twist and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books, rather than having a thousand copies spreading falsehoods over the whole world.” Perotti was writing barely two decades after the invention of movable type but the complaint would not sound out of place in the mouths of today’s critics, as they complain of the ephemerality of the blogosphere, decrying “churnalism” and “factoids” and lamenting the Chinese whisper effects of the contemporary internet.

An article on Renaissance commonplace books casts an intriguing sidelight on a modern debate. Whatever they read, Darnton summarises, Renaissance Englishmen appear to have read it in the same way: “Segmentally, by concentrating on small chunks of text and jumping from book to book.” Sequential reading arose only with the rise of the novel, “which encouraged the habit of perusing books from cover to cover”. There has been much self-questioning in recent years over the capacity of hyperlinked text and the web to change our patterns of reading and cognition – an issue memorably addressed by Nicholas Carr in a 2008 Atlantic Monthly article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” – but Darnton’s perspective shows that such a revolution may not be unprecedented.

The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree, professor of history at the University of St Andrews, and Reading Matters by the former editor and publisher Margaret Willes, are similarly studded with hauntingly familiar cases: bitter publishing disputes, an industry agonising over copyright and royalties, the threat of new technologies and means of supply; and all the while that constant clamour that true literature is dying. Pettegree’s book, which draws on new developments in digitisation to compare and contrast texts that would have taken half a lifetime of travelling to assemble, gives a powerful sense of the electric excitement surrounding a previous information age. Just like electronic books, print had its early adopters and its refuseniks: Pettegree quotes the saying of Federico da Montefeltro, the 15th-century Duke of Urbino immortalised in Piero della Francesca’s hook-nosed portrait, that “he would not allow a single printed book in his library”, and points out that it took many years before buyers of black-letter books could be “retrained to accept the monochrome finished article as an adequate substitute for the dazzling manuscript”. Meanwhile, the Benedictine Filippo de Strata was proposing that the Doge ban printers entirely from the Venetian republic for “corrupting susceptible hearts”: his scorn for advertisements that boast of how “for a small sum, men turn themselves into doctors in three years” still finds an echo today.

Reading Matters, with its nakedly punning title, “sets out to examine how people bought and acquired books over the past 500 years” by studying the lives and the reading habits of several collectors down the centuries. It includes irresistible glimpses of the bibliomaniac Samuel Pepys, who “kissed the bookseller’s wife” while making his purchases and left the world’s largest collection of 17th-century broadsheets; the melancholic John Soane, walled up in his palace of the mind in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; Allen Lane, the inventor of the mass-market paperback, and many others. Willes gives little space to considering the book’s future, although the Kindle slips under the wire into a footnote. She closes her account with the sardonic observation that, for books, “the one certain prediction is that nothing is certain”. This is determinedly a love letter to the codex, a study of the pleasure and pain it has brought down the ages.

Were the printed page to vanish from existence tomorrow, the two fat volumes of the new Oxford Companion to the Book, with their harvest of catchwords and lemmas, claps and clasps, coffins, gallows, friskets and tympans, might be a fitting eulogy. It provides extended scholarly essays on a variety of crucial subjects in historical bibliography and contemporary letters – titles range from “The Book as Symbol” and “Missionary Printing” to “The History of the Book in Korea” – while a dense thematic index offers some fascinating paths through more than 5,000 individual entries.

And what a delight those entries are. Close-packed columns distil the work of nearly 400 scholars from across the world, covering everything from library destruction and optical character recognition to the role of humble bookworms (which are “not worms at all, but the larvae of beetles” and which “may also supply valuable bibliographical evidence”). Just the briefest of visits to the OCB ensnares the browser in a happy low-tech version of the Wikipedian loop, as entry leads inexorably to entry and woodcuts give way to word balloons, Gillray to graphic novels, palm-leaf books to elephant folios.

In a book retailing for £195, a colour reproduction or two might not have gone amiss but, ironically enough, the only real problem with the OCB is that it’s a book. Even if the codex, in most of its forms, is far from ready to die – as Darnton points out, “manuscript publishing flourished long after Gutenberg’s invention, newspapers did not wipe out the printed book; the radio did not replace the newspaper; television did not destroy the radio; and the internet did not make viewers abandon their television sets” – reference is the one area in which electronic texts really excel. Hypertext, portability, search functions and regular database upgrades are clear boons to scholars, and in an age accustomed to instant information, the days of bound, slipcased, multi-volume reference works look to be numbered.

Not that Oxford needs telling. Electronic versions both of the OCB and last year’s astonishing Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary are already being prepared, a tacit admission that whatever the future of the book in general, these two resplendent elephants of the printed word may plausibly be among the last of their kind.