Could Our Books Get Destroyed?

  

These are tens of millions of books stored on the shelves of libraries, archives, museums, and in private collections. There are huge numbers of digitized texts, including things that no longer or never, existed physically. What happens when a war, natural disaster, the environment, an accident, a terrorist attack, a fire, or flood destroys our precious books, documents and records? What happens when something happens to the electrical grid or the technology everything is saved on becomes scarcer or malfunctions? 

If history is any kind of guide, we’ll survive, but we will have lost a lot of which we would not even know was missing.  

Really, we are there right now, For all of the book and manuscripts that exist today, we may have lost 50-90% of the publications that once existed but no longer do. How many books, scrolls, and manuscripts from around the world were destroyed? Kings, churches, and revolutionaries set fires to many collections, Rats, temperature, water, and environmental concerns may have destroyed invaluable texts and pieces of knowledge. Is it possible theories, ideas, facts, or solutions to problems were made and recorded hundreds of thousands of years ago, but because they did not survive, are lost forever? 

One book that explores this is Robert Bartlett's History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts. The book cites a study that estimates there are now more than one million Latin manuscripts from the time before Galileo lived but that these represent only one-sixteenth of those that existed, meaning we may have lost 15 million manuscripts.  

So, what’s interesting is just as one living in the year 1600 had no access to books that came after say 1675, people today don't have access to things that someone in 1600 may have had but that got subsequently destroyed. We assume or believe, because we have such a large collection of books that we have caught up and know more now than ever before, but what if important books that once existed no longer do are the ones that could really advance our world today? 

Books may seem permanent to us, but they are not, Even if we preserve several copies of every promoted book and digitize versions of each one, does not mean this content will safely remain with us forever. Nor should we assume that as time goes on, we’ll actually still understand language and content the way we may understand it now.  

What can we do to ensure all currently archived books will continue to survive, despite the challenges? What’s our contingency plan if conditions fail us and our literary culture is put at great risk? 

Not only is it important that our documents  survive and exist, but that they can be accessed by all. Will books be read the way they are now, or will we develop some other way to consume the content? Will it be free and available to everyone? Will we understand the language and the historical context of what we read? 

Just as important as having access to all published works is to have the ability to label, search, and find what we want. If something is mislabeled or designated to be one type of book over another, we will never find the books that don’t get presented to us in these searches.  

Our books define our society. We can’t afford to lose any nor can we afford to have books that we can't access, understand, or search for. It would seem that our books should be with us for a very long time, but it’s not hard to envision things going very wrong, where we suddenly shed millions of books and lose history, experiences, ideas, knowledge, and deep thought. 

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About Brian Feinblum

Brian Feinblum should be followed on www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2024. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog. His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully).  This award-winning blog has generated over 3.9 million pageviews. With 5,000+ posts over the past dozen years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” For the past three decades, including 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and director of publicity positions at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler. He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.