Does the book have a future? Can the word, in some form or other, hold its own against the growing influence in our culture of the moving image?
Thirty years ago these questions would have seemed preposterous. Twenty years ago they were being raised here and there as television's challenge to the book started to become evident.
They still are being raised, prompted by surveys that reveal a steady decline in the readership of newspapers among people of every age, but mainly the young, and high levels of adult illiteracy in the United States.
The surveys on literacy continue, for the most part, unpromising. But reports about the demise of the book are probably greatly exaggerated.
Actually, the prospect of a virtually bookless world was advanced a long time ago. "Books will soon be obsolete in the schools," said Thomas Edison in 1913. "Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to touch every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture."
Will that day ever come? Will the revolution that many believe began in the 19th century with Mr. Edison's inventions and followed by other electronic devices -- the radio, television and more recently the computer -- eventually realize itself?
Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism at New York University, calls this "the fourth communications revolution." Earlier ones were the development of language hundreds of thousands of years ago, the creation of an alphabet about 5,000 years ago and the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.
"I don't see why the printed word should be perceived as the be-all and end-all of education," said Mr. Stephens. "We can do better."
Mr. Stephens expects this revolution, which he admits is as slow in coming as it is ineluctable, to bring "a new kind of knowledge, new ways of thinking."
Edwin Gold, of the School of Communications Design at the University of Baltimore, thinks Edison might not have been entirely wrong in his prediction, only early.
Mr. Gold would substitute TV -- already more ubiquitous in our society than the telephone -- as the more likely instrument of Edison's prophecy. As TV screens grow sharper and large enough to encompass an entire wall in the average home, as the number of channels approaches 500 and the whole thing becomes interactive, all this will lay increasing claim to time once devoted to reading, and deaden the inclination to read.
Professors Gold and Stephens, and oth- ers, even detect the initial phrases of a new language in the terse storytelling capacities of modern TV commercials and in the visual acrobatics of MTV. It resides in the fast cuts, near subliminal images, all the frenetic motion projected on the consciousness by artful video editing.
Therese Mageau, editor of Electronic Learning, a magazine which reports on the growing use of electronic technology in classrooms, said:
"In the past in American schools, the most efficient way to deliver [information] was in the mass production of textbooks. That was the important technology of the time. Now there are other technologies available, and we encourage schools to use them."
These devices include computers with new learning software, videos, audio cassettes, modems, long distance learning by satellite and other means.
"We tend to believe that new technology will change life as we know it," she said.
These three people -- all devotees of what is known as electronic culture -- have two things in common.
First, they all anticipate an immense transformation in the way Americans live and learn, flowing from rapid improvements in communications technology. Their notions about the future are unclear, but they are certain this transformation is coming.
Second, despite their ineffable expectations about "new ways of thinking" or a "new literacy," they all also believe the book, or at least the written language, will not be erased by electronic culture, though probably it will diminish.
Even those with more extreme views on the matter, such as Lewis J. Perelman, the author of "School's Out: Hyperlearning, the New Technology, and the End of Education," a book which argues that America's schools should be abolished as useless remnants of another century -- grudgingly agrees.
Mr. Perelman said: "Books are an obsolescent technology. . . . The alphabet is quasi-obsolescent. . . . Writing skill is much less necessary than it was in the 19th century."
But he also said: "Text won't disappear. It has some nice $H qualities. It is efficient for certain things."
For those few who expect image media to eventually annihilate print, Dr. Gold cautions against following a trend line too doggedly. "Remember the idea of the paperless office?" he asked. "That's what the shift to computers was to bring about. Well, we got more paper as a result of the computer [the printer] and Xerox than ever before."
He said that "a case could be made that someday listening to tapes or oral books will replace the written word. I don't believe that myself, but to some extent print is likely to drop off."
Many people involved in this field are convinced that electronic manipulation of words, or text, is the way to bring the ancient technology of the alphabet into this modern world they see dawning. The way ahead is through interactivity.
This is what animates the people at the Center for Applied Special Technology in Peabody, Mass. Anne Meyer is a co-director of the firm that produces electronic curricula for schools and the disabled. It is curricula, she said, which offer "alternatives to print."
"Print, not text," she emphasized. To her there is a big difference: print is static, inert. Text, being electronic, moves.
Ms. Meyer and many others believe that children learn about something more easily "by acting on it and reacting to it." Software in computers or in electronic books, which allow readers to ask questions through the computer to elicit alternative outcomes, for instance, gives them a sense of participation, an awareness of options that books cannot offer, she said.
She refered to a computer program her company produces based on the nursery rhyme, "The House That Jack Built." It enables children to manipulate the story; they can change its outcome, its plot. Since the program also has a visual capacity, they can even change the architecture of the House that Jack Built, or the architect's name to, say, Jacqueline.
Not everyone in the field believes that being able to alter fixed text is all that important. Said Ms. Mageau, "No one's ever proved to me there is any value in somebody being able to change the ending of 'Moby Dick.' "
To her, the computer's value as an interactive agent is seen when it prompts the student with ideas, or draws questions, provides alternatives stimulated by those questions.
Offering a more sophisticated variation on this theme of interactivity are the hypertext people. Some of them will gather at a workshop at the University of Baltimore June 27-July 1, to exchange views on their enthusiasm. A few among them see themselves as rescuers of text, saviors of the word.
What is hypertext? Described at its simplest, it is writing for the computer: novels, nonfiction, to be read by people with other computers.
But these works are not like traditional books. First, they are distributed (mostly by mail order) on diskettes and CD-ROM. Second, they do not flow sequentially as ordinary books do.
The authors of hypertext stories offer their readers more than one plot line to follow, a multiplicity of outcomes. Some of them leave blank space on the diskette for readers to write in their own versions of how the story should proceed, even end. Others give only the materials from which a story can be constructed -- letters to an imaginary character, a few bills in his name, memos from his computer, his e-mail. All this allows the "reader" to
become the writer, which is the ultimate interaction.
Stuart Moulthrop, author of a hypertext novel, "Victory Garden," and a professor of English and communications at Georgia Tech, believes that hypertext signals a return to a verbal culture, "a word-based culture within the domain of electronic culture."
"It has been assumed since the Sixties that TV was more or less the end of the word," he said. "But the word is far from dead. What we are seeing in hypertext and hypermedia [the use not only of text, but images and music] are possibilities for the fusion of verbal and image based culture."
Others, alarmed by the perceived decline of reading, especially among the young, have sought to rescue the book in its more conventional form -- as an enduring, if static, repository of ideas and information embossed on paper, not as manipulable text on screens.
One of the earlier responses was made by the historian Daniel Boorstin, when he was the librarian of Congress. In 1977 he created an office in the library called the Center for the Book. Its purpose was to stimulate interest in reading.
It did, at least institutionally. Today the library has over 130 "Reading Promotion Partner" organizations. They range lTC alphabetically from the AFL-CIO to the Women's National Book Association. All encourage reading and writing, through essay contests, book fairs and other devices familiar to bibliophiles.
The American Library Association has been particularly vigorous this area. It focuses most of its efforts on the young. It finances summer reading programs for kids in public libraries, gives awards to the authors of children's literature, encourages new parents to read to their children.
Michael Thompson, a consultant at the Center for the Book, recalled the atmosphere in this country 18 years ago when the center was established: "Back then there was a lot of talk about the imminent disappearance of the book as people began to see the potential of computers. My impression is that it was exaggerated. I'm not saying things are all fine and dandy, but I think the book has more staying power than people realize."
There is evidence for this. Many more books are being printed these days in the United States. This year "Books in Print" will list 1.2 million books, 174,000 titles more than were published last year. This continues a steady growth over the past half decade, according to Daniel Dickholtz, senior associate editor for the reference book.
The New Jersey based company that produces "Books in Print" is moving toward publication of a reference for of CD-ROM titles, said a company spokesman.
Also, book circulation in the 9,000 public libraries in the United States has risen by 48 percent between 1980 and 1992, according to the Public Library Association in Chicago. "People are reading," said George Needham, PLA director.
All this would seem to belie the data gathered by sociologist John P. Robinson at the University of Maryland. His studies indicate that the average adult in the U.S. reads less than half an hour a day. That represents a decline of about 25 percent of time devoted to reading in over two decades.
"The trends are pretty clear," he said. "I am showing an increase in reading of books and magazines and decline in newspaper reading." But the rise in the reading of books and magazines, he points out, is not so great as the decline in newspaper reading.
Thus, a contradiction emerges: Reading as an activity is generally diminishing as book sales are booming and libraries are busier than ever.
What is the answer? No one seems certain which signal is the more valid.
"We think about this a lot," said John Y. Cole, director of the Center for the Book. "It's [a contradiction] we have been living with from the start at the center. Book sales are up; the industry is healthy. It depends on how you want to see it: Is the glass half empty or half full?"
Those inclined toward the latter possibility could point out that, contrary to the expectations of Ms. Mageau, the editor of Electronic Learning, not to mention those of Thomas Edison, textbooks remain the "most important technology" in the schools today.
Dr. Cole indicated that the challenge to the book by other media seems to have revealed a hidden flexibility in the more ancient medium. "The book, in a way, is being perpetuated through other media," he said. In fact, this is literally true at CAST, where the company's new computer program, "The House That Jack Built," was created by scanning the pages from an old book that Ms. Meyer owned.
In this way it was reborn -- with music, moving images, interactive text. But it remained a book in another form.
Richard O'Mara is a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.