It’s had a great five-hundred-year run .  .  . but it’s time to change.

The Gutenberg Museum, Mainz

Newscom

So Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com has said of what he quaintly calls the “physical book.” Of course, since his own company’s Kindle is one of several electronic competitors to the physical book now on the market, he has a vested interest in heralding the latter’s obsolescence. Yet few anymore would want simply to dismiss the notion. Last year, Amazon’s sales of ebooks overtook those of the ink-and-paper kind, which seems like a portent if anything does.

But a portent of what? Last year John Naughton of the Observer asked readers to imagine themselves to be burghers of Mainz in 1472, 17 years after the invention of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, who are asked by an anachronistic pollster to rate on a scale of one to five (five being the most likely and one being the least) the probabilities that the newfangled printed book would

n Undermine the authority of the Catholic church.

n Power the Reformation.

n Enable the rise of modern science.

n Create entirely new social classes and professions.

n Change our conceptions of “childhood” as a protected early period in a person’s life.

It’s safe to say that not many fives would have been given out.

We are now, or were at the time Naughton wrote, 17 years away from the general availability of the Internet, and equally clueless about what its long-range effects will be. That makes it a good time for Andrew Pettegree’s immensely learned book (new Kindle electronic version now available) to remind us where books came from before they disappear from their usual haunts, and libraries, when they continue to exist at all, become even more museum-like than they already are.