Livingiching's Blog

Is the book dead?

The recent announcement of the iPad certainly looks as if it will change the way we read. I don’t know if that will happen or not, and I’m certainly interested to see if it does. But I bring this up now because the I Ching has already gone through many different forms. From inscriptions on bone, to writings on slips of bamboo, to scrolls, and to bound books,  the I Ching has already gone through the “death” of several technologies and it still survives. So I think it will easily go into the digital world, and this very site is part of that evolution.

Let me mention one critical way in which a book (in whatever form it takes) is invaluable: it transcends time and space. Through a book, you can communicate with people long dead. If you’re an author, you can communicate with people after your own death. You can communicate over vast distances. The internet makes that obvious, but even in the past, when a book was smuggled to someone, or mailed overseas, it had this marvelous ability to open up entire worlds of ideas to people. Nearly every religion was spread in part through books.

So let’s not be so quick to dismiss the book. It’s a wonderful thing, and it’s going to morph into other forms. The iPad book store still uses the metaphor of the book and bookstore, and so it’s really the book taking on a “virtual” form. As such, then, the book is not dead and books like the I Ching will continue to speak across what would otherwise be barriers.