Borsuk’s final chapter on the book as interface had me thinking a great deal about remediation and the process of it. All the history of humanity has really been the history of storytelling, and a book is nothing but a method of transmitting a story. Borsuk writes, “historian Matthew Rubery contends that the medium [of audio books] emerged to both reproduce the printed book and repair its shortcomings” (205). No matter how much we all may love books and the idea of them, there are some things the traditional codex volume simply cannot do. “Literature,” Borsuk writes on page 208, “emerged from an oral tradition that included bards, troubadours, filid, meddahs, and griots, among other literary performers.” If we continue to think about literature in this way, then we can trace the origins of mankind’s and bibliophiles’ obsession with the story and, as a result, the book, to a point some tens of thousands of years ago around a fire where the first fragments of language were being used to weave together tales of imagination. The oral tradition is the absolute baseline of story. It is what we are always striving to replicate. The book is only one point in the long and complex history of human storytelling.

Storytelling has been in a glacial process of change for all of our history, slow and nearly imperceptible, but once the process is complete, or has moved on to a new phase, the landscape is radically changed in ways that we may not have foreseen. I think that what we are living through, when it comes to books and the perceived threat they are said to be under, is perhaps better understood as a shift in the way story is told. If a book is only a nexus for that, then it is of no higher or lower order than a podcast, an audiobook, a video game, or any other current or uninvented method of storytelling. The book has been romanticized so much by those of us who love them that to envision a world without them is terribly frightening, but this romanticization is only a result of the times in which we live. As we discussed earlier in the semester, there was backlash and fear ascribed to reading and what it would do to the minds of the people from the great thinkers of the Hellenic period of our history. So it should come as no surprise the backlash new forms of storytelling receive when they first emerge in our contemporary conversations.

The knowledge of storytelling’s remedial nature should give us some hope that all is not actually lost when it comes to human knowledge and creation and culture. We are merely watching it turn into the next form of itself. An era may be drawing to an end, though the book will likely never go away, the main methods of knowledge dissemination and storytelling may shift dramatically. As Borsuk says in the final paragraph of The Book, “Some scholars consider this period of textual fixity and enclosure the Gutenberg parenthesis, rather than the Gutenberg era, suggesting that we are returning to a culture that values orality and ephemerality, no longer needing ideas bound between covers or owned in quite the same way” (258).