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Is There a Future for the Book?

The chapter considers the recent idea of ‘the death of the book’, by which it is believed that the digital age spells the end of the book as a physical object. However, the history of the book has always been marked by changes in media, in which apocalyptic prophecies are made about the end of knowledge. The chapter uses Walter Benjamin on the concept of ‘aura’, and Freud on the ‘magic memory tablet’, to trace through a philosophical idea of the book as containing a sense both of power and of threat and danger. Different types of physical book in history (clay tablet, scroll, codex, printed book, e-book, smartphone) are compared in order to open up a question about how books are valued and also damaged, from ancient Babylon to the Holocaust, and to ask what the status of books is today and into the future.