I have tremendous faith in the book and I know people often say well it’s going to be replaced by e-books and e-readers and whatever the future, whatever the future manifestation is. And I can see that the technology will allow for a certain kind of reading, pleasure reading, things that we don’t you know, we don’t need to digest in a terribly sophisticated manner.
But I still believe there’s a place for the book itself in the process of working with children. When I conducted my interviews for “Everything I Need to Know, Learned from a Children’s Book,” what amazed me the most was that people I talked would often forget the author of the book, they would say it was such and such a book, and you probably remember who the author is.
But they would always remember the person who shared it with them, their name, whether they were a school librarian, public librarian, a teacher. They would remember what was going in their lives, one of them said, I remember what the light was like in the room the day the teacher read us “Charlotte’s Web”. That the memories are whole memories.
The memories are whole memories, it’s only half what the material is, it’s only half what the book is. The people and how they played in that memory are the full part of the memory. So Steve Forbes will remember what his mother read, but what he talks about and what it was like to sit in his mother’s lap and have her hold up this book for him and read to him.
And he creates the whole memory of that. I think that’s what gets lost if you think all your reading’s going to be on kindle or it’s going to be on an electronic device because that does not allow that close personal interaction. And that is what the book is ideal for and I believe our longing for that close personal interaction literally goes back to the cave when people sat around and told stories.
You know, and they passed on things together. And I don’t think technology will replace that. I’m not afraid of it, I think it can do many interesting things. I love the picture book format, I think it’s one of the most perfect formats ever invented, but it has constraints on it because it has to be 32 or 48 pages, one of the printing technology constraints.
In the future you could use however many pages you needed to tell a story because it might not have anything to do with printing, it must just have to do with what you can put on that screen and the kind of words you need to use. So I think there are things that technology can free up for us, but in the end I just think the power of the book is extraordinary.
Ever since Gutenberg invented movable type, people have been predicting the end of the book. My father pioneered television and everybody at that time said, children won’t have to read anymore, they can see everything on television. Now we now think this is ludicrous of course because of what’s on television. Radio was supposed to replace reading.
We always go through this, it’s like the lure of the technology. And we think, oh it’s going to get rid of this thing, but I think there’s much more primal and much more important in a book.