Turning the page

BRENDAN LEMON: When we were setting up this interview you mentioned that the great blind Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, whom you read aloud to for a couple of years when you were a student in Buenos Aires, had already, in 1941, forecast electronic books. How so?

ALBERTO MANGUEL: Well, this is a bit of a joke, but do you remember Borges's story "The Library of Babel"?

BL: Yes.

AM: In the footnote to that story, he says that whole library, which includes every text in the world, could be reduced to one handheld book of infinitely thin pages. The new electronic books are in fact this book that Borges had imagined, because the notion of infinitely thin pages is akin to the notion of the screen of pulsating letters.

BL: Digital books, books on CD-ROM, and the downloading of books off the Internet to read on our TV screens or personal computers raise all sorts of questions about the way we read and the ideas we have about what books should be. How do these technologies fit into the history of our relationship with the book format?

AM: The first thing to bear in mind is that throughout history, we have had different forms of books, and though some have supplanted others, we have often gone back to certain forms. In fact, if I can digress briefly, one version of the digital book, the Rocket-Book, relates back to several earlier different forms of the book. It has the physical form of a Mesopotamian tablet, for example, without the scrolling, but it has the codex pages of the handheld book.

BL: Any other helpful historic context?

AM: Because Christian culture in the early centuries wanted to forget the pagan literature, an enormous number of manuscripts were lost. A very small percentage were found again during the Renaissance. When that happened, the scholars copied the manuscripts and preserved the copies but weren't interested in the originals. Now, when we download a digital book or copy text from one disk to another, we are again no longer interested in the original source. It disappears. We erase it from the hard disk or we are no longer concerned with what we have downloaded from the Internet. I think we should hold on to both the codexes - the hard copies, if you will - which continue to be very practical and intimate, and the electronic book forms, which are fantastically useful. As always, it's a mistake to think we have to prefer one or the other. As soon as we start thinking "either/or," rather than "both," we're in trouble.

BL: Why do you think that for some people there is the tendency with a new technological form to immediately resist it and treat it as presenting a case of "either/or"?

AM: Most people hate being disrupted. They like the security of what they know and they don't want to be troubled with having to replace the idea they have and to carry old and new in their head at the same time. It's a problem in every possible area, from sexuality to transport. When you say to somebody, "My sexual preference is not A or B, but more fluid," it's too complicated. People don't want to think about that. People don't want to deal with ambiguity in the richest sense, in the sense that says: You don't have only one option.

BL: One of the things that you point out in your book on reading, which I think applies to a discussion of new forms of books, is that new technology tends not simply to supersede what came before it but often makes us aware of the virtues of the earlier technology.

AM: Absolutely. And a new technology can do something else: Because we are not as advanced as it is, we tend to revert to the vocabulary of the previous technology. With the invention of cinema, for example, one of the first reactions was, "Now theater is dead." With the invention of photography, it was "Now painting is dead." And, of course, they weren't. There is this moment of competition when the public seems to perceive that a new medium will take on the characteristics of the previous one and improve them. Only when the artists begin to become really interested in the new medium and develop it properly do we realize that, although new and old may have points in common, there is a whole vocabulary and a whole set of possibilities that is unique to the new medium. Regarding the topic of our discussion, we are still thinking of things like CD-ROMs or electronic books as gadgets, when in fact I have begun to see certain creations - for instance on CD-ROM, by people like Chris Marker - that transcend gadgetry and are absolutely fabulous. With Marker, you have an artist who is beginning to see the potential of this new thing and say, "It is ridiculous to use this for a book. It's like saying, We have the new medium of cinema, and all we are going to do is statically film somebody onstage."

BL: A couple of years ago, when television started to be used to link up to the Web, I would look at what had been downloaded on the TV screen and already be imagining things that could be happening on that monitor. They were quite different from what I was looking at, which was literally just large type scrolling across the screen.