Sunday, September 26, 2010

Librarian of Congress James Billington on 'Tapping the Stored Wisdom of Books'


Link to September 24 Washington Post Op-Ed column, "Choose Your Own Adventure".

Excerpt: Saturday marked the 10th anniversary of the National Book Festival. Why, you may ask, celebrate books at a time when everything is going digital? Certainly the book business is in a transitional state like all print media. But books are not going away. New technologies tend to supplement rather than supplant older ones. Television did not destroy radio; the VCR and DVD players did not keep people from movie theaters. While the technologies we use to read books may change, the value of reading them does not; and the values of the book culture that helped create our nation must not be left behind. In an era of 140-character messages and the increasing destruction of the basic unit of civilized discourse (the sentence), it is critical that we continue to encourage the production and reading of books.

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