The Case for Books

Past, Present, and Future
Author: Robert Darnton
Genre: nonfiction, history
Publication info: PublicAffairs, 2009
Pages: 218

It’s been a little tough figuring out what book to read after finishing Les Misérables, so I went with a book about books. I actually just spotted this book on a shelf in the library and picked it up on a whim. The subject of books interests me, especially dealing with the rapid changes that are occurring in how people consume them.

Robert Darnton was, when he wrote this book, the director of the Harvard University Library. The Case for Books is a collection of essays, some written expressly for this book and others previously published. I expected it to be mainly a spirited criticism of the rise of the digital book, but what I got was something quite different. Darnton has actually been something of a champion of digital publishing, spearheading a project called Gutenberg-e to increase the prestige of digital publishing in academia.

His main concern is with Google Books, not because he disagrees with its mission to digitize books from libraries across the world and make them accessible to everyone, but because he doesn’t like the idea of Google controlling it all. He makes a good point. Information should belong to everyone, not be controlled by a single entity. But because Google beat everyone to the punch by aggressively scanning books, the opportunity may have passed to make this information more open and democratic. In Darnton’s view, this type of service should be provided by libraries, whose first priority is the advancement of knowledge rather than profit.

Anyway, that’s not actually what I found most interesting about this book. The subtitle is Past, Present, and Future, and it was the “past” part that intrigued me the most. Darnton is an expert on eighteenth-century France, so in his essays he gives a fascinating look into how the book trade worked back then. One of my favorite parts was an exposition on something called the commonplace book, in which people would compile quotations from books they read and from people they talk to. These commonplace books give historians great insights into how these people viewed the world around them, what they thought was most important. It would be great to bring back the commonplace book, but I guess that’s what people use Pinterest and Facebook for nowadays. Makes you wonder what historians will think about us hundreds of years from now. What will they think we hold most important?

I enjoyed The Case for Books. Robert Darnton is an incisive thinker and skilled writer. It wasn’t particularly life-changing, but it did make me think about some things.