With tablets and e-readers, are books going the way of the scroll?

You remember books, don't you?

Long before people had Nooks, Kindles and iPads, they did most of their academic reading through an instructional technology known as the book. In case you have never seen one, let me explain: A book is a collection of printed pages gathered between protective covers and fastened along one side.

I'm kidding, of course. People do still read books — lots of them. Yet we are witnessing the most dramatic change in learning technology since the invention of the printing press. Reading is going digital.

Some people are claiming that it's the end of the book as we know it. As Lev Grossman recently wrote in The New York Times, “Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It's shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes.”

To make sense of what is happening, it helps to know a little history. Once upon a time, the book itself was a new technology — the iPad of its age. Formerly everything had been inscribed on a scroll, but gradually more and more things were written down in a codex. The codex was a volume formed of bound leaves of paper or parchment — what today we would call a “book.”

Roughly a millennium later, the handwritten codex began to be replaced by the printed book. Learned scholars worried that something would be lost in this transition. In a pamphlet entitled “In Praise of Scribes,” Trithemius argued that the ugly, fragmentary, error-ridden products of the printing press could never match the durable, beautiful manuscripts that flowed from the pen of a learned scribe.

This was hardly the first time scholars had worried about the effect a new technology would have on the dissemination of knowledge. Prior to the advent of literacy, words were only spoken, never written. So before the codex, the scroll itself was a new technology.

This technology, too, had its critics. None was more famous than Socrates, who warned: “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories.” Although your disciples will appear to be omniscient, the great philosopher went on to say, they “will know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

These examples provide needed perspective on the digital age. This year a dozen scholars on the faculty at Wheaton College have been discussing the history of learning technologies in an interdisciplinary seminar called “Christianity and the Book: Its Past and Its Future.”

So far we have only worked our way up to the fourth century, but as a participant in the seminar I have already learned more than I ever expected. We are reading books on the transition from orality to literacy, the development of the codex, and the transforming influence of Christianity on the use and format of books.

It turns out the early church championed the codex. Whereas Jewish, Greek and Roman scholars favored the scroll, Christians were early adopters and disseminators of the codex. Why was this?

It is hard to be certain. Possibly missionaries found it easier to carry religious literature in book form than in cumbersome scrolls. Or perhaps the physical form of the codex bore clearer witness to the unity of the Word of God. For the first time, the entire Bible could be bound as a book between two covers.

All of this is part of the book's past. What remains to be seen is whether the book has a future.

These days the champions of information technology are quick to pronounce that books are dead. Yet history would suggest otherwise. The transition from one learning technology to another usually takes a long time, sometimes centuries. Thus it is not surprising to learn that the use of print media is on the rise, not the decline. Or that more books are being published now than ever before.

Perhaps this trend will reverse in the coming decades; perhaps not. In all likelihood, though, printed books and digital books will continue to exist side by side for the foreseeable future.

And Christians will continue to prize the Word of God — in whatever form they read it — as they have done since before the book was invented. As a Wheaton alumna doing missionary work among the Zulu people of South Africa recently wrote: “As the old generation passes away, there are certain styles of speaking and writing that vanish. However — and this I can say with all certitude — the Word is not changed. The ancient Scriptures are potent in creating God's Kingdom today.”

Ÿ Philip Graham Ryken is president of Wheaton College. His column appears quarterly in Neighbor.