The annual National Book Festival is an opportune moment to reflect upon the enduring significance and symbolism of the book. The book has a long and distinguished history, featuring prominently in human affairs and culture since antiquity and in contemporary society. The book has been central in the construction of both civilisation and culture by helping to advance, refine and materialise ideas and thoughts while simultaneously enabling them to be disseminated, shared and studied across spatial and temporal boundaries.

The book is indeed one of the greatest and most enduring technologies invented for the benefit and betterment of humankind.

While some people worry that the internet and information communication technologies may undermine the book, it is important to remember that the book itself is an adaptable and flexible technology that has survived, thrived and evolved along with other technologies and systems throughout the centuries.

From ancient scrolls to Victorian stereotyping, the book remains. From hand-written manuscripts to mass market paperbacks, the book endures. From the Roman codex to the e-book, the book evolves. From papyrus to pixels, the book adapts to help meet the needs and desires of its particular time.

The book’s form and format has changed over the years, yet, its main purpose – to educate, enrich, entertain, inform and inspire individuals, communities, and cultures – remains unaltered. These changes have neither diminished nor destroyed the book but, instead, have expanded its nature, scope and content.

New kinds of technologies and means of writing, producing, publishing, distributing, selling and trading books have resulted not in undermining but in strengthening the book.

For example, while the medieval monks’ beautiful but individualised manuscripts preserved culture in the so-called dark ages for a rarefied clerical and aristocratic elite, the printing press permitted the book’s mass production and the democratising spread of educational and informational light to the people.

This technological shift was not to the book’s detriment but, rather, to its progressive development.

The book’s various transformations encountered resistance and ridicule, especially by the old orders who believed or treated it as their exclusive concern. But with each change and step in its development, the book, as a concept and as a technology, broadened its reach and influence, created new kinds of itself and associated genres and formats and established increasingly diverse audiences and communities of readers.

Despite its many reincarnations, and indeed because of them, concepts of and practices with the book have been enhanced.

The book has gradually, and grate-fully, changed from an elite to a mass technology, both through the technologies themselves and also through various complementary information systems that developed around and for them.

The book is being augmented by new technological capabilities as it experiences a physical to digital shift

The Victorian public library system (and its important contemporary descendants), for instance, supported and spread the book and the cultural practice of reading to the public rather than it being a luxury reserved for the moneyed minority.

The internet and its digital libraries, literary databases, educational websites and search engines have also helped spread the book – while dynamically updating its form and format into the dynamic e-book – more cheaply, conveniently, quickly and widely to ever more people around the world.

What this means is that the book is no foreigner to change.

It has undergone, and continues to undergo, different stages of development, adapting to and, in most cases, outliving, the latest technologies, business models and other political economic factors affecting it from one era to the next.

Presently, the book is in the midst of a shift from the printed page to the networked screen. But this print to digital transformation represents only the latest stage of its development.

Like the new technologies before them, the internet and latest ICTs (which themselves are constantly evolving and upgrading) are expanding what the book can be, what it can do, what it can offer as well as who it can reach.

The book is being augmented by new technological capabilities as it experiences this physical to digital shift. The e-book, for example, is more interactive and richly layered with all kinds of media compared to the print book.

The e-book can permit direct discussions among readers of the same book in real time. It can provide avenues for readers’ feedback to other readers, potential readers, and authors. It can permit communication between readers and authors.

It can enable the highlighting of passages and posting of notes and other commentary in (the margins of) the document. It can allow readers to add to, and in some cases alter, content.

E-books can even allow for publishers and online booksellers like Amazon to create and exploit data-driven software programs to increase knowledge about how readers actually read: how much time they spend on each page, how long they take to finish each chapter, what sections they revisit, when they abandon the book and so on.

Further, the e-book is being layered with different kinds of media that was not possible with its print version. For instance, audio, video and graphical elements, in addition to links to external websites and other e-books, are being included with the written word.

There are also literary websites and databases, not to mention online library catalogues and services, that offer readers and authors alike new avenues for publishing, promoting, reading, sharing and interacting with all kinds of books and book genres, from novels to short stories, uploaded books to ‘born digital’ documents, classics to smut, scholarly works to professional materials and substantial ideas to trifling fluff.

Indeed, the internet and ICTs are greatly amplifying and augmenting new and unique possibilities for interaction, communication, personalisation and socialisation with and for the book.

Regarding these new technologies as a threat to the book neglects the fact that the book itself is a powerful technology that is brilliantly and triumphantly adaptable.

It is also important to note, moreover, that regardless of dynamic digital books, the print book will continue to have a long and successful life. Print books remain the most desired kind of books for most readers, owners, collectors and lovers of books.

E-book sales, while robust, are far from consuming the overall (global) book market. Many readers and publishers, in fact, expect the popularity of print books to endure in the long-term, co-existing and probably continuing to dominate their electronic counterparts.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The print book endures while the e-book changes the very concept of the book into a networked entity. Regardless of changes, past or present, the book’s noble mission remains unchanged and unchallenged to educate, enrich, entertain, inform and inspire individuals, communities and culture.

The book, in other words, persists. Its future is bright indeed.

Mark Kosciejew lectures at the University’s Department of Library, Information and Archive Sciences.