The Book: The Life Story of a Technology

by Nicole Howard

Book Overview

One of life's most frequently encountered technologies is perhaps the one most often taken for granted: the printed book. Daily contact with books makes these everyday objects so familiar that one is apt to forget that the invention of the book has more profoundly altered civilization than almost any other invention. This volume provides a broad overview of the printed book's development across many centuries, cultures, and in a variety of fields...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 031333028X
• ISBN13: 9780313330285
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Greenwood
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Good, serviceable history

This is a useful book if you are looking for a standard and readable history of the book. It seemed to me authoritative, but its citations are a bit skimpy. Sometimes the author tells us where she's getting her information, and at other times she doesn't. The bibliography is OK. Howard doesn't advance an argument or any new thesis about the history of the book. Rather, this is a convention history of a technology, based on progress and development. I wish she had had more to say about what newer technological changes actually pose to the relevance of the book itself. She just assumes that the book will always be important, but I think this is a presumption that one can't so easily sustain.