I listened to the Diane Rehm Show this morning and her guest was Robert Darnton: author, librarian at Harvard, and founder of the Gutenberg-e program. During the interview, a caller claimed that more vinyl records were being produced than there were ten years ago. Darnton replied that this illustrated the principle that one medium does not replace another. The point of the caller was that even though digital books and articles are obviously the future, this doesn't necessarily mean the death of the book. I hope this is so. I love my Kindle and downloadable PDFs for research, but I equally love the hundreds of books on the shelves in my study.

I'm not quite sure that the examples are as comparable as we might think, however. I think the rise in interest for vinyl might just be a temporary nostalgia for the past. After all, it is not really back to basics for music, as you still need to purchase an expensive piece of equipment to play the vinyl records properly. In this case, digital really is superior.

But books are different. They are simple, yet powerful. A book and possibly a pair of glasses are all of the technology you need to connect yourself to centuries of great ideas and rich experiences. Plus, there is something fundamental and connective to the human stream in learning and entertaining yourself the way we have done it for centuries. For this reason, books will be with for a long time.

Darnton is the author of The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, available ironically, on the Kindle.

The interview is located here.