Books Are Dead Long Live Books Summary

Priscilla Coit Murphy begins her article Books Are Dead, Long Live Books by siting the work of a man named Octave Uzanne who predicted in 189e that “the book-as-we-know-it would soon disappear”. She then goes on to site other articles from 1919, then 1925, and so on and so forth. The many examples of misguided notions that other mediums would lead to the extinction of books all but make Murphy’s argument before she even begins to write. After displaying an array of evidence Murphy introduces three basic themes (rivalry, convergence, and complementarity) that have been highly discussed and speculated upon for generations regarding the shelf life of books as a product. The first theme that she explains is rivalry. The thought that people
My only gripe is that it is very dated, I would love to see a follow up piece to hear what Murphy thinks about the current state of print media with the arrival of online news and social media. The research was fantastic, it is almost comical to put media and technological advances in perspective and see how many times we as a culture have guessed wrong. People have continually underestimated the power of print and the sophistication of younger generations. Juxtaposing the stock market reports for books with other media sales was a great way to dismiss the rivalry theory. Reading this in 2017 or, the future the complementary model is by far the most accurate to today’s society. My take away from the article was that even though and industry may begin to fade it will take a very long time for it to keel over and die. The radio industry is another great example of this. When books television came along it grew rapidly and people belived radio was dead. Now, in the last five years it has had a revival with podcasts and is still a very prominent market. So just because an industry may become less profitable due to competition or new mediums it does not mean is will immediately become