Is the codex obsolete?

Abstract

Is the codex obsolete? It seems as if we're moving in that direction. As I sit down at the desk in my living room to write, I glance out the window of my apartment. In the distance I can see the strip mall that holds the empty shell of a recently-shuttered Borders bookstore. I can also see a corner of the East Towne Mall's branch of Barnes & Noble, which has included in its restructured business model an aggressive push towards electronic reading, in the form of its Nook e-reader. As I revisit this semester's content, I also notice that my iPad holds every bit of those readings, stored safely in the data ‘cloud,' as we now refer to it.

Much of this is a product of a world that has been increasing exponentially in pace since the first breaths of the Industrial Revolution. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, not only are our mediums changing, but so are our messages, and along with that, we are in the midst of a major shift in what it means to “know” at all. Yet despite the old-world laments of Mark Bauerlein, who cries that we are equating “handheld screens with Madame Bovary,” this is not the end of civilization, nor is it an entirely bad thing. My aim in this essay, then, is to suggest a path of four steps that has generally accompanied many of the major shifts in book production and in reading, and to speculate on what the twenty-first century technological shift might mean for the near future of the codex, and for the act of reading itself.