if:book meditates on the nature of libraries private and public:
There’s a pessimistic view of human behavior embedded in library construction and the watchfulness of the sentries who guard them: if we, the public, could get at the books, we would most certainly destroy them.
There was the expectation that the barriers would be torn down with the coming of electronic libraries, that once the book’s spirit left its object, it would likewise escape its economic shackles. Certainly it makes sense: an electronic text isn’t degraded by copying in the same way that every reading is an infinitesimal destruction of a physical book.
Is this “infinitesimal destruction” – the sense that an artifact being degraded by those who value it the most – embedded in the nature of a book? I find electronic books ghostly and unsatisfying; the Kindle is a ouija board for the stillborn soul of a book, a mausoleum rather than a library. Is it wrong to want the world to collapse slowly around me while I collapse back into it?