In the convivial range. Of the six balances: 1 tipping, 3 holding, 2 not assessed. Position somewhere between 53 and 83 of 100. The balances not assessed could put it past the second watershed.
- Biological degradation Not assessed Does this tool damage the living world, or the body, faster than either can recover? Not assessed: nobody has looked at this yet, so it is not counted as holding.
- Radical monopoly Holds Can people still meet the need another way, without this tool? Holds: the tool does not cause this problem.
- Overprogramming Tipping Does using this tool require training or certification that people cannot give each other? Tipping: the tool has begun to cause this problem, without going past the limit.
- Polarization Not assessed Does this tool move power or advantage to a few, at others’ cost? Not assessed: nobody has looked at this yet, so it is not counted as holding.
- Obsolescence Holds Does this tool force people to replace what still works? Holds: the tool does not cause this problem.
- Frustration Holds Does this tool give back less than it takes, counting everything it takes? Holds: the tool does not cause this problem.
What it does
Holds text and pictures on pages bound along one edge, so a reader can carry it, open it anywhere, and return to any passage without power or permission.
Where it stops
At the page. A book says the same thing to every reader, cannot watch who reads it, and leaves the pace and the meaning to them. It cannot update itself, report back, or be withdrawn once it is in your hands.
How easily you can stop using it
Close it. A book in your hands creates no dependence: you can lend it, sell it, give it away, copy from it, or rebind it, and it needs no one’s permission to keep working. A book you are assigned is another matter; see the six balances.
What is scored
- The unit: The printed, bound book: the object in a reader’s hands, and also the uses it is put to, including as school’s set text. Left out: licensed e-books, the pressure to read at all (see Imposed literacy), and the cost of making paper, which is not yet assessed.
- The job it is tested against: Holding text so a reader can carry it and return to it. It does this reliably.
- Where and when: The codex from about 1150 to the present, on Illich’s account of the page. Four of the six balances are assessed.
The book here means the codex: pages bound along one edge, between covers. It replaced the scroll in the Roman world by about the fourth century and has carried most reading since. This record is about the object. The skill of reading and writing has its own record, Literacy, and reaches a very different verdict.
What the form does
A scroll has to be unrolled to find a passage. A codex opens at any page. It takes writing on both sides, can be held in one hand, and can be numbered, indexed, marked, and shelved. Those are the usual explanations for why it won, though historians of the codex are cautious about how much each one mattered.
The page before and after 1150
Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text (1993) is a history of the book as a tool. It is a commentary on the Didascalicon, a guide to reading that Hugh of St. Victor wrote in Paris in the 1120s. Illich argued that the decisive change came about three centuries before Gutenberg. Until then a monk read aloud or in a murmur, slowly, and with his whole body. Illich notes that the Latin pagina, page, also meant rows of vines, and legere, to read, also meant to pick or gather. The page was, in his phrase, “a score for pious mumblers.” Reading was a way of life more than a way of getting information.
Around the middle of the twelfth century, scribes changed the layout of the page. They added chapter titles, paragraphs, marked quotations, tables of contents, and indexes in alphabetical order. These let a reader find a passage without reading the whole book, and take in an argument by eye. Illich’s claim is that this produced something new: the text, a thing that could be thought of apart from any one page or voice. Scholastic reading, the university, and later the printed book were built on it. Printing spread the bookish text. It did not invent it.
Illich wrote the book because he thought this period of about eight hundred years was closing. He saw the screen replacing the page as the main image of what a text is, and he wanted to describe bookish reading clearly while people still practised it.
What print added
Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) argued that printing changed the book’s effects more than its form. Identical, repeatable pages let thousands of readers hold the same text, and that, he claimed, trained them to see the world as uniform and sequential. On Illich’s account the printed book spread a kind of text that scribes had already invented.
A convivial object
Illich called the library, at its best, the prototype of a convivial tool (see The public library). A library is a collection of books that anyone may borrow, so that judgement rests on what a book is. It is cheap to make in quantity and lasts for centuries. It needs no power. It can be repaired with thread and glue, and it keeps working when its publisher is gone. It does not know who is reading it.
Illich thought the age of bookish reading was ending, as the screen replaced the page as the image of what a text is. He did not ask for the book to be defended as an institution. He wanted bookish reading kept as a practice that people choose and share, in what he called houses of reading.
The six balances
Scored as set out in How to evaluate tools. The book reliably does its job, so it starts in the convivial range.
- Biological degradation: Not assessed. A book needs no power to read and can last for centuries, but paper-making has real costs in wood, water, and energy.
- Radical monopoly: 0. A book does not stop anyone learning by speech, practice, or example. The pressure to read at all belongs to Literacy.
- Overprogramming: 1. The book is also the main instrument of schooling: the textbook, the set text, the reading list. Illich made the same point about libraries organized as teaching devices.
- Polarization: Not assessed. See the open questions.
- Obsolescence: 0. A codex printed five hundred years ago can be read today with no equipment, and nothing forces an upgrade. Licensed e-books are a different tool and need their own record.
- Frustration: 0. A book asks for attention and gives back as much as the reader takes from it.
Where the threshold falls
In the convivial range, at 53: one of the six balances is tipping, so its position is 50 + 3. The object itself is close to a model convivial tool. What tips the balance is the uses it is put to, above all in school.
Open questions
- Score polarization. For much of its history the book was costly, and printing, selling, and owning books were licensed or forbidden. Does that belong to the book or to the powers that controlled it?
- Catalogue the e-book and the e-reader separately, with their licences, formats, and tracking.
- What does the screen do to bookish reading? Illich thought the age of the bookish text was ending. Find current evidence on sustained reading, and say what it does and does not show.
- Assess biological degradation: paper, ink, and shipping against the energy cost of reading on screens.
- Add a source for each advantage claimed for the codex over the scroll, and page references for the claims taken from In the Vineyard of the Text and McLuhan.
Sources
- Illich, Ivan. In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
- Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality.
- McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
- Roberts, Colin H., and T. C. Skeat. The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1983.