[In the following review of The Gutenberg Elegies, Stevens evaluates Birkerts's insights on the act of reading in an electronic environment.]

Technocrats are likely simply to reject the views expressed by Sven Birkerts in these fourteen challenging essays as being a Luddite love of the way things are. Old-fashioned librarians are likely simply to accept those views at face value or, worse, to quote excerpts that they may have read in a review to justify their continuing reluctance to deal with technology. That would be unfortunate, for in The Gutenberg Elegies he presents a carefully reasoned point of view of various aspects of reading, and not necessarily other forms of communication, and how the skills and techniques of reading are altered and changed in an electronic environment. All of us, and especially librarians, can learn a great deal from a thoughtful reading of these essays regardless of whether we disagree or agree with what he has to say.

As Birkerts is careful to point out in his brief introduction, "The Reading Wars," much of what he has to say is derived largely from his own personal experiences as a reader. That is especially true of the seven essays in the first section, "The Reading Self," of his book. Much of the content of those first essays is predominantly autobiographical and carries us from his attendance as a college student at a lecture by Anthony Burgess, through his career at Borders when it was simply an Ann Arbor bookstore, to his battles to keep his daughter from being overwhelmed by the entertainment environment that surrounds the release of a film like Beauty and the Beast. Those initial essays give the reader a sense of how he has developed the views he will express in the concluding essays in a way that we seldom are given by other writers dealing with the complex issues of technological change. Along the way, he also uses those essays to begin to develop his major theme, which is that reading is a dynamic, subjective, analytical, experience that enables us, as individuals, to develop our own sense of meaning to the world. In the best of those initial essays, "The Shadow Life of Reading," he talks in an analytical way about how he approaches the experience of reading, including not only the physical aspects of that experience but the important intellectual aspects of what he carries away from that experience. By the end of those first essays, he has provided some important insights on the process and meaning of reading as we have known it.

In the second section, "The Electronic Millennium," Birkerts offers four essays in which he examines the question of how reading, or, perhaps more realistically, our interpretation of texts, changes in an electronic environment. In those essays he examines carefully the significant differences between reading in a print and an electronic environment initially by largely summarizing the commonly understood differences between the linear, private, static, layered, permanent nature of a printed text and the free-flowing, public, dynamic, incremental, and temporal nature of an electronic text. If that was all that he had to offer, his essays would be entertaining but of somewhat limited value. Fortunately, his analysis continues into a more thoughtful philosophical consideration of how we view and interpret words as they are presented to us in various ways. While almost an aside, his essay "Close Listening" that deals with the experience of listening, or "reading," audio books is especially charming but also especially valuable for its analytical insights into the distinctions between reading and listening to the same works.

In an attempt to place his experiences and his views into a broader context, Birkerts's three main concluding essays, in the section "Critical Mass: Three Meditations," deal with the larger cultural context of the changes that are taking place by examining what he sees as a decline in the quality of our literary or intellectual life, the substantial decline or death of literature, and the unfortunate ways in which our culture and technology have changed the life and role of the serious writer. Oddly enough, while clearly more analytical and certainly less personal, those essays, which are built around his analysis of other works, seem more superficial and, in some measure, distract from the important things that he has to say about the nature of the reading experience.

All of what Birkerts has to say is finally neatly summed up in a concluding brief essay, "Coda: The Faustian Pact." There he admits that the process of electronic transformation is well under way and is not likely to stop. He ponders the meaning of that transformation in terms of "giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture" in favor of a quest for information by "pledging instead to a faith in the web." He concludes that we should refuse to partake of that transformation although it is difficult to see how that is truly possible at this stage of the game.

On balance, The Gutenberg Elegies is an important contribution to our ongoing discussion of the nature of the continuing electronic revolution and its impact on the nature of the process by which we "read" and acquire information, knowledge, and wisdom. Its immediate value may lay in its strong challenge to accepting the electronic age, as futile as that may be, but its long-term value lies in the valuable insights that Birkerts offers into the nature and process of reading as we have known it. In the long run, we will all be the poorer if we fail to take those insights into account as we design and implement electronic alternatives to the book.