[In the following review, Sharratt exposes several assumptions that inform Birkerts's analysis of reading in The Gutenberg Elegies.]

Major historical transformations can be imagined most poignantly as parental anxieties. Any book-loving parent today contemplating a 5-year-old daughter absorbed in the first magic of solo reading can whisk forward to her teen and college years, vicariously re-anticipating that first full encounter with Austen, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann—only to halt this nostalgic rerun in sudden recognition of an alternative possible scenario: of a generation by then so enmeshed in electronic information, so tuned in not just to television but to pervasive interactive multimedia, so besotted by on-line data services, as to have grown up barely acquainted with printed books at all, except as museum exhibits or as unwelcome inherited wallpaper.

This worry is the starting point for Sven Birkerts's collection of essays The Gutenberg Elegies, which focuses on the epochal shift he sees occurring between print and electronic media. He imagined his daughter graduating into a post-book world already partly inhabited by college freshmen so attuned to the rapid rhythms of MTV as to be wholly unresponsive to the patient patterns of Henry James's prose, so seduced by the flickeringly powerful identifications of the screen as to be deaf to the inner voicings of print.

Several times Mr. Birkerts sketches the opposing poles of the transformation he sees awaiting our children: from books to electronic circuits, from print-based linearity and logic to the semi-arbitrary serendipity of hypertexts. The global inrush of digital data across a screen is to replace that remembered cozy curl in the armchair, coiled into expectation, exploration and adventure. Never again, even, that quick oblivious dip into the paperback thriller, until the subway stop enforces a jerky re-entry into reality.

Mr. Birkerts has a palpable emotional investment in the richly evoked book world he fears we are about to lose. A candid and engaging autobiographical account sketches his own almost obsessive trajectory through avid childhood reading, adolescent bookshop browsing and amateur book collecting, culminating in that common dream of book lovers: managing a secondhand bookstore. Then the final, predictable failure of his novel-writing efforts twists the story into a modestly happy ending, with his late discovery of a talent for criticism and his subsequent career as respected reviewer and freelance essayist.

Unfortunately, as his warmly elegiac essay on Lionel Trilling recognises, the profession of critic opened its doors for Mr. Birkerts some decades after its apogee: the ethos of those "last intellectuals" of the 1930s has long dissolved, their print-based cultural influence barely conceivable to today's aspiring freelancers. Here Mr. Birkerts's diagnosis seems unfocused, uncertain whether the emergence of a narrowly academic literary profession his driven a wedge between a general reading public and the best of literature, or whether the commercialization of publishing has brutally reduced available work to the lowest bottom-line denominator. This sense of unspecific analysis arises partly because Mr. Birkerts's own book echoes the form he commemorates in Trilling, the republication of loosely linked occasional pieces as an essay collection.

That genial mode falls short of the claims he makes for the book form as such: linearity, sustained narrative, cohesive argument. There are individually rather slight pieces on a CD-ROM collection of classical Greek literature, on the experience of driving while listening to audio "books" and on the limited appeal of current hypertext fiction. Yet each piece only makes opening moves, without building collectively into an overall case.

The core, and persuasive achievement, of the book is Mr. Birkerts's attempt to capture the central experience of reading he fears may soon be lost. He acknowledges that "I value the state a book puts me in more than I value the specific contents." That state is "other than thinking." a peculiar process of immersion, of filtered double-consciousness of both the book's world and our own, a two-way involution of self into character and of text into voice. This state underpins, for Mr. Birkerts, our very capacity for complex language, for self-formation, for historical awareness.

Yet though this profoundly reflective process is skillfully described, Mr. Birkerts's formulations of his wider position seem, under scrutiny, dubious as a basis for grasping any truly epochal change. "The complexity and distinctiveness of spoken and written expression," he writes, "are deeply bound to traditions of print literacy"—yet Cicero had never seen a printed book. "The depth of field that is our sense of the past … is in some essential way represented by the book and the physical accumulation of books in library spaces"—but did the archivists of Alexandria therefore have that same "depth of field," and is an adequately archeological sense of the past primarily a matter of books or of sensitivity to sites, stones and sediments? "We may even now be in the first stages of a process of social collectivization that will … vanquish the ideal of the isolated individual"—but was the "isolated individual" ever an ideal or rather an image of exile and alienation?

One summarizing passage suggests a deeper flaw, bias or limitation of horizon. Mr. Birkerts writes: "Consider the difference. Text A, old-style, composed by a single author on a typewriter, edited, typeset, published, distributed through bookstores, where it was purchased by the reader, who ingests it in the old way, turning pages, front to back, assembling a structure of sense deemed to be the necessary structure because from among the myriad existing possibilities the author selected it. Now look at Text B, the hypertext product composed by one writer, or several, on a computer, using a software program that facilitates options. The work can be read in linear fashion … but … the reader can choose to follow any number of subnarrative paths, can call up photographic supplements to certain key descriptions, can select … possible endings. What is it that we do with B? Do we still call it reading? Or would we do better to coin a new term, something like 'texting' or 'word-piloting'?"

This writing has, in Lawrence's phrase, its thumb on the balance. We should think also of Text C: the Duc de Berry's Book of Hours or William Blake's Songs—luscious illumination, resplendent multimedia, hyperlinked entwinings of text and image. No typewriter could produce a single page of either. Or Text D: Peter Greenaway's TV Dante or Andrei Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev—compelling re-imaginings of one medium into another.

It is not a new term for reading that we need, but rather the imagination to devise new creative forms, appropriately innovative genres, beyond the dispiriting design clichés of business "presentations," the flat fantasies of video games, the essential inertness of interactive information kiosks. The new Limbourgs (the medieval artists who illuminated the Book of Hours) and the Blakes of the electronic era will one day learn to think beyond bulletin boards, digital encyclopedias and multimedia versions of 19th century novels. Mr. Birkerts complains, with sweeping pessimism, that "electricity and inwardness are fundamentally discordant." Does he really read by candlelight?

In Henry James's Manhattan of carriage mews and horse droppings, no one could have judged the future of the horseless carriage without the capacity to imagine both reeking exhaust fumes and the purring sleekness of a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Our granddaughters may one day treasure their multimedia disks as much as Yeats once relished those "beloved books that famous hands have bound." In the 1480's a conscientious bishop paid a printer to proofread, against the original manuscript, each individual copy of the whole print run of a liturgical text. Some anxieties can, eventually, become merely historical. After 500 years, though, it's sad to still be saving goodbye to Gutenberg.