infoneer-pulse:

What we cannot survive without is ideas. Life on earth would be severely diminished without the well-thought-out, well-researched, written works that communicate expertise, insight, and creative ideas from one human being to another. That, historically, has been the role of books, and they have played it admirably, in works from the Bible to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Silent Spring and The Shock Doctrine.

In our angst about the Kindle and the iPad, we are conflating the “how” of written works with the “what”: We are mistaking the package for the thing itself. What would be terribly frightening to lose is not the book per se but the tradition of long-form texts—call them “lofties”—that for centuries have been the primary vehicle through which creative, illuminating, controversial, and important ideas have been communicated. What is crucial at a time when habits of consumption are changing—for reasons both economic and technological—is to ensure the future of lofty ideas, whether they are set in Bodoni or pixels, hand-sewn at the binding or backlit and scrolled.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)