The future of reading
If you’ve got stuff you need to finish today, do not look at the Public Domain Image Archive. A new tool from The Public Domain Review, it offers, “10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse”. Or at least it did this morning – new images are added every week, so by the time you’re reading this the number may well have increased again.
It’s a literal treasure trove, with brilliantly characterful images that I could spend all day browsing through, and some even have accompanying essays written by The Public Domain Review. I tried searching for ‘magazine’ and it threw up a collection of bizarre illustrations by the artist Albert Robida, which appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in 1894. They were created to accompany a story called The End of Books, written by French bibliophile Octave Uzanne. Follow the link beneath the pictures, and you not only get to read a digitised copy of the original article (in fact the whole issue of Scribner’s is available to flick through), there’s also a handy essay by The Public Domain Review, commenting on Robida’s provocative original.
The story begins in London, around 1892, with the author walking in a group of men, (“book-lovers, artists, men of science and of learning”) who had just been to, “one of the scientific Fridays of the Royal Society, at a lecture given by Sir William Thomson, the eminent English physicist, professor in the University of Glasgow, universally known for the part he took in the laying of the first transatlantic cable.”
Enthused by the great man’s lecture, and then lubricated by Champagne, the friends start competing with each other to come up with increasingly outrageous claims about the future. A vegetarian argues that all food will be eaten, “in the form of powders, sirups, pellets, and biscuits… [so] the world would cease to be the unclean slaughter-house of peaceful creatures, a grewsome larder set forth for the gratification of gluttony, and would become a fair garden, sacred to hygiene and the pleasure of the eye.”
A painter alarmed by the rise of printed artworks predicts, “there will be no painters in the twenty-first century, but instead of them a few holy men, true fakirs of the ideal and the beautiful, who amidst the silence and incomprehension of the masses will produce masterpieces at last worthy of the name.”
The author is then asked to give his opinions on the future of books, and he creates an uproar by predicting the end of print, “which since 1436 has reigned despotically over the mind of man, [but] is, in my opinion, threatened with death by the various devices for registering sound which have lately been invented”.
His reason is simple enough – reading is hard, and “the man of leisure becomes daily more reluctant to undergo fatigue”. He continues, “Our eyes are made to see and reflect the beauties of nature, and not to wear themselves out in the reading of texts; they have been too long abused, and I like to fancy that some one will soon discover the need there is that they should be relieved by laying a greater burden upon our ears.”
Take a look around any train or bus in rush hour, and Uzanne’s predictions seem prescient. He didn’t foresee the phenomenon of commuters blasting videos from their phones at full volume, but his basic idea of people wanting an easier, more passive way of consuming media is spot on.
Reflecting on the original article, the essay by The Public Domain Review concludes, “It’s curious to consider that the new technology of being able to record and reproduce sound made Uzanne think books would soon be a thing of the past. Perhaps his dire predictions about the end of books can help us put more recent dire predictions in perspective. Audio and video may take up some of the time we’d otherwise spend reading; yet the technology of the book always seems to prevail. Obviously, it did back when Uzanne was writing, but even today it marches stubbornly on.”
I’d put things a little more strongly than that – for lots of people, audio and video have almost totally replaced books and other print, and even dedicated readers have to keep their screen time in check. Our eyes are more likely to reflect the glow of our phones than the beauties of nature, but even when a technology seems totally dominant, there can still be a yearning for something else – it’s not a coincidence that the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 was ‘brainrot’.
We know now that people haven’t replaced their meals with tablets, and painters do exist in the 21st century, but there’s still plenty to be unsure about. These days we’re beset by a new wave of predictions from men and women who are convinced they know what the future holds. The centre of power has moved away from London, and the grand ideas are more likely to originate in California or Beijing, spilling forth from people who have tasted the true power of AI, or the metaverse, or short-form vertical video.
It’s easy to imagine how Uzanne and his friends must have felt, hopped up with the excitement of a lecture by the professor who had just connected Britain and America for the first time. They were living in genuinely unprecedented times, and that sort of epoch-defining technological change has a way of making people feel that more must be coming just around the corner – progress begets progress, right?
But change doesn’t run in nice, straight lines, so as we sit on the cusp of our own radical shifts in politics, media, and society, I find it strangely comforting to know that the future remains as inscrutable as ever. And as technology rushes ahead, promising ever greater speed, automation and efficiency, I’ll be paying attention to those resources that have been created with care and attention by humans who have something to say, whether that means reading books or magazines, or scrolling through an archive of 10,000 images when I really should be doing something else.
Images from the Public Domain Image Archive, source University of Toronto Libraries / Internet Archive
