The Fate of Books in a Digital Age
by David E. Shi
President of Furman University

Founders Day Address
Presented at Centre College
January 20, 2002

Instead of a lecture, my remarks tonight constitute an informal series of reflections about the ways in which the technologies of communication are affecting how we read, think, live, and relate to one another.
The topic is relevant to all liberal arts colleges and to all learned people, and its essence can be distilled into a single question: what are the implications of our increasingly digital world on the culture of books that has long been the core of liberal learning?

What prompted me to think about the fate of the book was a provocative statement by the Canadian writer Robert Fulford. He recently announced that the traditional book is in danger of becoming “an outdated shrine, a place only for occasional worship.” Fulford notes that only 10 percent of the population reads 70 percent of the books published in the United States, and the majority of adults never read for pleasure.

The dwindling interest in books and serious reading raises an obvious question: As we rush to get “on line,” as we make the transition from book to screen, tactile to digital, are we abandoning some of the basic premises and processes of liberal learning?

After all, the most important transmitters of our knowledge and our reflections have been books. Books have formed the core of civilized life, the juncture where facts and feelings meet. For centuries, books have provided a primary source of pleasure, inspiration, and instruction at every level of our cultural life. Yet now we are told that the bound book has become an outdated and doomed technology, a mere curiosity of bygone days. The dean of the architecture school at M.I.T. predicts that books in the 21st century will be irrelevant “except to those addicted to the look and feel of tree flakes encased in dead cow.”

I must confess that I am such an addict. I love books made of wood pulp and leather. Even though I spend much of my working day in front of a computer screen manipulating a twitching cursor, I remain devoted to books. I buy them, borrow them, loan them, and give them away. I read them, review them, write them, collect them, stumble over them, think about them, even dream about them.

Books make for pleasing company. They are quiet, accessible, and patient. They don’t whine or call during the dinner hour, nor do they carry grudges. They suffer interruptions with grace and are eminently portable. They accompany you to lunch or the bathroom or the beach, and in the process they provide wise counsel and welcome companionship.

Of course, books are more than a source of intellectual interest; they can also become objects of art and affection. In our house, in fact, books furnish the rooms. They line the shelves to overflowing and sit in untidy stacks on tables or in corners.

On occasion, provoked by a fleeting desire to winnow the sprawling collection, I gather up the most exposed and under-appreciated books and donate them to a local school or library. Yet no sooner do I reduce the volumes than the craving for more reasserts itself.

Such is the fate of the bibliophile. Like an alcoholic attracted to a liquor store, I cannot pass a bookshop without going in. Once inside these alluring bazaars, I stroll the aisles, lingering here and there, pulling one book and then another off the shelves, scanning the table of contents with ravishing eyes.

Ever since my youth, reading has provided me with some of my choicest pleasures and clearest convictions. Yet in this frenetic era of diminished leisure, the habit of reading bound books is on the wane. The chaotic pace of our wired and wireless world often denies us the time to engage a serious book. People much prefer the less strenuous pleasures of television and video. A recent study reports that over half of American adults spend less than 30 minutes a day reading anything at all. For Americans under 30, films and video have replaced books as the primary medium of culture.

As both a theoretical and a practical matter, those of us concerned about the fate of the book need to engage rather than dismiss the digital revolution and its magical implications. For, like it or not, it is the future that we will experience.

Yes, reading text from a screen rather than a printed page may produce a different series of responses from the reader, but such responses may not necessarily be incompatible with those stimulated by a printed book. In coming years, bound books and electronic books will exist side by side, just like home stereos and Walkmen do today, and they may in fact come to complement one another in delightful ways.

The choice we face is not simply between computer screen and printed page—our predicament is much more urgent and stark: namely, between a future in which serious reading has a discernible influence within our culture and one in which it does not. That we are faced with this choice has little to do with whether a book is in print or pixel form, and everything to do with the nature of well-established mass media such as radio, television, film, and the commercialized popular culture these media have engendered.


Jessica Shi ’02 with her parents, David and Susan Shi. They made sure she grew up in a house full of books.

These beguiling forms of passive entertainment have immersed us in the trivial and the ephemeral. As a result, fewer and fewer people find sustained reading sufficiently stimulating, and, as a consequence, the verbal scores and rhetorical abilities of young people are steadily declining.

Virtual reality and digital graphics encourage us to bypass writing and even language altogether, suggesting that words are outdated substitutes for graphics and video. Close reading and deep thinking are demanding activities, and most people would rather watch TV or play a video game or surf the Net. If we do not sustain a commitment to reflective reading, then it matters little whether the books of the future are printed or electronic. Our capacity to form critical opinions and make informed decisions will continue to diminish.

So I end these remarks with an avuncular plea for you to turn off the TV and the computer and pick up a book, in any of its forms. The habit of reading will keep you humble, invigorated, and informed. It will expand your horizons and will keep you thinking when all of your other faculties are diminished.

Other than marital bliss and wine, learning is perhaps the only source of satisfaction that improves with age. As the British writer Thomas Carlyle recognized, “What we become [in life] depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest college of all is a collection of books.”

Happy reading!

David E. Shi spoke at Centre’s Founders Day in January 2002 and received an honorary degree during the ceremony. “The Fate of Books in the Digital Age” is an abridged version of his remarks. A historian, Shi taught at Davidson College for 17 years before becoming Furman president in 1994. His books include The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (1985), which was a History Book Club selection, and two books that were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His daughters include Jessica Shi ’02.


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