Amazon link: The Gutenberg Parentheses by Jeff Jarvis, 2023

This book is a history of mechanical printing from the original Gutenberg invention in 1450 through all the various forms of printing and the institutions to which it gave rise — mass market books, newspapers, pamphlets (political, religious, and otherwise), business forms, not to mention more—if not entirely—standardized written languages, and so on. All of this took time. We became fully emersed in the parentheses when print entirely supplanted scribes—by around 1550—the first institution to be wiped out by the new technology. 

In Mr. Jarvis’ opinion, we are now leaving Gutenberg behind. The parentheses are closing. Why? What has changed? Two things. First, what characterized the Gutenberg era was that word impressions were transferred to paper using ink in one way or another. Second, while there came to be many printers, not everybody could become a printer, and eventually, most (never all) printing became consolidated behind large corporate entities that ultimately controlled content.  Even where electronics became part of the process (sending photos and text stories by telephone, telegraph, and so on), at the end of the line, again, ink met paper. Mr. Jarvis claims that with the invention of the Web (1992-4), we entered a new era in which communication, text or otherwise, is no longer conveyed by ink on paper. Also, everyone (those with Internet connections) can be a producer in the new era. The mass conveyance of authorial output is no longer dependent on controlling institutions like publishers. 

The author believes and advances the argument that the internet age is already eroding what went before (newspapers are being wiped out, for example) while new, emerging institutions—NextDooor?—are beginning to replace it. The reason for replacement is not the same. Printing was much faster than scribes. Except for the loss of some artistic merit to transcribing by hand, Print’s efficiency was what mattered. In the Internet age, newspapers are being wiped out not because the Internet is more efficient but because advertising—which did not exist until 150 years after Gutenberg—has moved over to the Internet, depriving the papers of the income needed to print.

Jarvis believes we are roughly where Guttenberg was thirty years after his invention. He fails to account for technology’s accelerated timelines. We are more like 100 or even 150 years on compared to Gutenberg. That still leaves a long way to go. The institutions that printing spawned did not fully emerge until some 400 years after Gutenberg. New institutions will undoubtedly emerge from the Internet. Some have already been tried and found wanting. The hypertext novel doesn’t work because it is too distracting. The Internet suffers from a problem inverse to the limitations of print: trading limited access to publishing technology for such easy access that the sheer number of voices drowns any one of them out.

Surely, Jarvis is right that there is still more change to come, and we cannot anticipate its details. Printing wiped out the scribe. The Internet will not wipe out the printing business, though it will (and has already) skewed its economics. Ebooks on backlit devices tire the eye faster than paper and ink. Kindles are exceptions, but they also require electricity. Jarvis thinks (implicitly) that electricity will be around forever. Pages printed on cotton rag paper can be read for hundreds (and more) of years. Even quality (wood-based) “acid paper” (not newsprint) will last one hundred years or more. If electricity disappears with modern civilization’s climatological, ecological, and economic unraveling, the Internet and everything written upon it will disappear. More than half of what has been written on the net since 1994 is already gone forever. Technology will not be of much help. Bits can be “permanently” stored on tape or other technologies for ten or even a hundred years. There will soon be “glass storage” technologies that will hold terabytes of data for thousands of years on something about the size of a credit card. Still, access will require electricity (not to mention other advanced technology). Contrastingly, printing the old mechanical way (a la Gutenberg) requires no electricity and only fifteenth-century technology.

Jarvis’ book is a well-written history of printing, often reminding us that books were and are only a part—relatively small—of printing’s products. He is also undoubtedly right that the net will engender new institutions even if it doesn’t entirely eclipse the old, as Gutenberg’s invention did the scribes. Alas, that evolution depends on sustaining our present, highly technological (and for many reasons unsustainable) civilization long enough to serve that gestation.