16th February 1997

Internet is the freedom of the brain dead

No plug, no wires, no rivals

In five centuries, science has failed to produce anything more useful than the printed book- including the Internet

Let us assume the wiz-ards had their way. In every corner of every home, office and school glows a lighted screen. Oozing from the Internet is all that mankind could desire. Each housewife is plugged into the Library of Congress. Each five-year-old can summon Relativity Theory at the squeak of a mouse. Electronics shares reach record levels.

Into the denim-walled offices of Internet Mogul Bill Gates walks a Mr. Caxton. He has contrived a method of putting this material into portable form. His invention needs no lighted screen. It enables written words to be read with the naked eye, and even fashioned into compact volumes to fit into a handbag. They are immune to viruses and do not crash jet planes. Mr. Caxton's contraption requires no costly electronic hardware, no batteries, cables or wall plugs. Third World Countries can use it. Mr. Gates sees the threat instantly and shows Mr. Caxton the door.

Had the book come after, not before, the screen, I lay money the pundits would have declared the Internet a passing and costly fad. Out would go the dirty, eye-tiring screens with their plugs and wires and inconvenient sockets. In their place would be books, objects of beauty customised to the needs of the mobile leisure classes. Governments would subsidise school libraries and set up bookshops on every street corner. Teachers would be retrained to read. Tony Blair and Michael Heseltine would launch "Book 2000" initiatives and donate millennial millions. Books, being cheap, would liberate the poor and be the salvation of culture. Caxton would move to Malibu, wear sneakers and top the Fortune 500.

Last week a Policy Studies Report confirmed what I long suspected. Beside every terminal lurks a furtive reader. The popularity of books has risen steadily over the first decade of the "information revolution", a revolution that was predicted to herald their demise. Book sales are up since 1989, as is real-terms spending on books, the latter by an extraordinary 45 per cent. The number of titles has almost doubled since 1987, giving the lie to the publishers' lament that too many books are published. The percentage of the population buying 16 or more books in a year has risen from 28 per cent to 30 per cent. The public loves books and has thumbed its nose at the much-hyped revolution - or at least regards it as having nothing to do with books.

That revolution has already seen three of its most over-promoted innovations degenerate into small niches (Ceefax/Prestel, touch-screen, CD-Rom). Books-on-screen has died almost at birth. Now comes the Internet. The zest of computer firms to get parents and children hooked has sent them pleading to politicians for help. Needless to say, politicians will oblige. The Labour party's David Blunkett is today promising a £150 million subsidy to install the Internet in schools as part of a British Telecom promotion. Last October Michael Heseltine made a similar pledge for the Tories. Neither made any mention of helping schools to buy more books.

A civilisation declares itself by its books. A house without books is a shelter but not a home. Children who do not read novels may be trained but not educated. "Computer literacy" is an essential tool for living, like being able to handle money, law and personal relationships. It has nothing to do with literacy. Screens aid information retrieval and offer harmless fun. But to substitute computers for schoolbooks is a travesty. To suppose that cybernauts from the World Wide Web are about to zap the writers and readers of books as co-sponsors of Western culture (as did the University of California's Survey The Future of the Book) is ludicrous.

So great is the commercial hyperbole surrounding the Internet that common sense is obliterated by dazzle. It has proved a boon for pornographers and lawyers and for the sort of up market pen pals who used to rave about Citizens' Band radio. For companies and interest groups, the "interment" is a more efficient version of the fax. E-mail has done wonders for the ancient art of letter-writing. I can see that being able to download the entire British Library on to one's kitchen table, or cruise the Louvre from one's armchair, is in theory exhilarating. But like Heath Robin son's suggestions for winning the Great War, the concept is unlikely to have widespread application.

The Internet is one more electronic craze that market forces will sooner or later put in its proper context. For the time being, its fanatical proponents need the sympathy and tolerance once extended to Esperantists and radio hams. In the history of science, I would place the Internet well behind the word processor, the telephone and the light bulb. It is popular because it is still heavily subsidised by the computer industry, and soon by the Government. Children, victims of the present marketing drive, need to learn computing alongside many other skills. But that is not what the Treasury will shortly be subsidising.

All this will soon shake down. What is absurd is for screen communication to require for its self- esteem the ridiculing of books. Highly paid seminar addicts such as MlT's Nicholas Negroponte deride the book for having to be taken down from a shelf and "accessed", one person at a time. Geoffrey Nunberg declares in the Berkeley book (sic) that most books as "bound, printed volumes will likely disappear soon". The deconstructionists proclaim that the "closed" book is dead. The advent of digital hypertext will liberate the reader from "the tyranny of the writer". I suppose smashing pictures on the floor liberates viewers from the tyranny of artists. It is the freedom of the brain-dead.

Thoreau famously warned against inventions as merely "improved means to an unimproved end". I accept that the goal of the written word is in part the dissemination of information. The Internet is an aid to this. Even here I do not believe it will seriously challenge the printed reference book. With both Internet and books at my disposal, I make vastly more use of the latter. They are, as Caxton showed. simply more convenient than something plugged into a wall and requiring constant energy.

The surprise star of the PSI survey was books of the imagination. Fiction is still the biggest category of books bought. Novels have not been replaced by computer games or video nasties. The latest Archer, Francis or Grisham may not rank with Milton's "precious lifeblood of a master spirit". But the vitality of literary publishing, poetry, plays and novels, defies the Jeremiahs of the publishing industry.

The book is the seminal invention of modern civilisation. The history of communication since Gutenberg and Caxton testifies to its appeal. What arrived on the cultural landscape back in the 15th century has remained unchallenged, certainly by anything that electronics can offer. To move a mountain, you must write a book. To found a religion or launch a political party, you must write a book. Attack an enemy, support a friend, tell a story, justify a career, you must write a book. Even if you wish to sneer at books, you must write a book.

The Internet will strut an hour upon the stage, and then take its place in the ranks of lesser media. It needs no subsidy. If we want to splash public money on culture, splash it on books-The Times , London

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