There is nothing in the findings of the men represented here, who come from a number of professions and fields of learning, to inspire alarm in the breast of the book-lover. For the verdict is practically unanimous that the book has a long lease on life, perhaps not as a handsome artifact, but certainly as a means for the storage and transmission of knowledge. Its new competitors, though they may dazzle with some feature of novelty or ingenuity, prove to have limitations of their own. And the physical changes in book manufacture, which cause some to feel that the book is on the way out, are hardly greater than those in the past from papyrus scroll to vellum codex, and so on. Professor Howard W. Winger summed up the sense of the meeting when he said: “In providing for the storage of information and for its efficient retrieval, the codex book has been without a peer. It can hold more and yield it more readily than any other tool that has been devised up to now.”
The real threat appears to come not so much from the new means of transcribing and reproducing as from the fact that the book is overmultiplying itself. It is a saying among professional librarians that the modern library, like money at compound interest, doubles every sixteen years. Although certain leveling-off forces prevent the actual increase from being quite that terrifying, storage is in most places an acute problem. For the same reason, reference grows increasingly complicated. A student becoming familiar with a field needs to find his way now not among a few books, but among hundreds or thousands, so that “the sheer bulk of recorded information is today a cause of serious concern.” Our methods of getting at the contents of books are lagging behind book publication. It is a fact that mathematicians are at work trying to devise more adequate means for classifying and retrieving the information piling up in libraries.
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