Each of these quips emphasizes the terminality of the book. Even when it becomes easy to make notes in the margin of an electronic text, your notes will be irretrievable without technology of equal or greater sophistication than that in the machine you use now, and the software will need to be compatible, also. Anyone who s had problems using current software to access files even only a couple of years old can understand the trouble likely to accompany that enterprise. Books are good at transmitting information to a large audience, with very little dependence on technology for their success. The information in books remains intact, also, unaffected by distance or time.
Books are simple to use, and don t require mastery of a complex skill set.
Each of these conditions is an aspect of terminality, underscores the book s value as an information tool, and ensures its persistence as a technology. New technologies, at least for convenience s sake, resemble the older technologies they eventually replace, as we saw in the case of the moveable type page imitating the manuscript. A powerful new technology also not only tends to imitate the old technology it eventually displaces, it affects older technology in another way as well. It will have a creative effect, not just a seemingly destructive one, on older technologies, because it will force a re-evaluation of the usefulness of the older technology, even when it doesn t supplant the older technology. This is what we saw happen with the microwave oven and pots and pans.