The Evolution of the Book

Behold the humble book. Printed books are portable and durable, with type designed for readability. They are so ubiquitous it’s hard to imagine a time when they were rare or nonexistent. New technologies are expanding the definition of a book, with more changes sure to come.

The evolution of books and reading fascinates Geoffrey Turnovsky, whose research and courses touch on the history of texts.

“When you think about the printed book, it’s a mix of different technologies, some of which go pretty far back,” says Turnovsky, professor of French in the UW Department of French and Italian Studies and co-director of the UW Textual Studies Program. “What’s interesting is that new technologies are always hybrid — they always build out of old technologies — so in a way, you can never quite get to the beginning of the story.”

Writing systems date back thousands of years, long before the introduction of books. Lengthy documents were written on scrolls of papyrus, which were portable but not easy to navigate through. Imagine reading “War and Peace” on a scroll, being 15 linear feet into the book and wanting to look back at the first reference to a character. Not easy!

Then came a huge technological leap: the wide adoption of the codex around the third century CE. Sheets of parchment were fabricated from stretched animal skin, scraped to create a smooth surface. Unlike brittle papyrus, parchment sheets could more easily be folded, creating folios that could be bound together as a book.

The codex format was used for manuscripts in medieval Europe, with copies handwritten by scribes. The process of copying texts was arduous and led to inconsistencies in the copies.

“Creating identical copies by hand is difficult,” says Turnovsky. “Try writing the same text out multiple times. Imagine having to write hundreds of pages. The likelihood that all the copies will be the same is low. There are going to be substantial differences.”

By the late Middle Ages, the demand for more consistency in copies, and for more books in general, inspired another technological leap. Around 1440, Johannes Gutenberg developed a new method in Europe for copying text, using moveable type and a press to print off the type. Though moveable-type printing technology had long existed in other parts of the world, Gutenberg’s method was notable for greatly expanding the scale of production.

The printing press was a huge change from scribes copying texts by hand, yet it took a while for printers to let go of certain aspects of medieval texts. That’s common for new technologies, Turnovsky says.

“In this case, you’ve got a reading public that’s used to reading manuscripts,” Turnovsky says. “The point isn’t to create something completely new but rather to find a more efficient way to reproduce what people are already expecting and want.”

That meant trying to reproduce the look of a manuscript page. Fifteenth-century scripts were complex and often compressed, containing numerous forms for single letters, as well as many abbreviations and ligatures (two letters combined into one symbol) — an approach that sped up the copying and allowed for more text on a page. But to approximate that look in print required creating hundreds of different glyphs or symbols in movable type. This made the work of the compositor difficult and reduced the efficiency of the printing process. Over the next century, European printers abandoned most of these scribal symbols in favor of the more concise and consistent Roman typeface, still commonly used today.

The change to printed books also influenced the reading experience. In his 2024 book, “Reading Typographically: Immersed in Print in Early Modern France,” Turnovsky discusses how print technology shaped reading practices. More than the medieval manuscript, print — which was streamlined and standardized — diverted the reader’s attention from the physical platform. The printed book became simply a delivery vehicle, with ease of reading as the goal. That encourages a more immersive reading experience.

“Printed books give you an experience of the text that is as unmediated as it could be,” Turnovsky says. “As they read, the reader can imagine they are not reading but hearing someone speak. The book becomes a vehicle for a kind of sensory experience, a tool to deliver experiences of deep emotional connection to another human being.”

About six hundred years after Gutenberg’s printing press, digital technology inspired another major change in text production. Like the early printing press, early digital books tried to replicate the experience of print books, simply delivering them on the screen instead of a printed page. That has been evolving to take advantage of the benefits of digital technology — links to more information, multimedia experiences — but discovering a new technology’s full potential takes time.

“We’re about fifty years into this,” Turnovsky says of digital technology. “This gets to the question of how long it takes cultures to evolve around a new technology. In some ways, it takes centuries. With print, copyright emerged about 300 years after printing technology developed. It may be a long time before we sort out systems to help us fully navigate and regulate this new technology.”

Comparing print and digital texts, what feels most different to Turnovsky is the temporary quality of digital technology. Websites come and go. Content saved for future reading may be impossible to find a year later. This, he says, is why print is still vital.

“Printed text is a material artifact that’s going to last,” he says, noting that UW Libraries’ Special Collections has incunabula — printed books from before 1500 — that are still in excellent condition. “Depending on the quality, a book can be more than 500 years old and you can read it as if it were printed yesterday. And the content of the book is not going to change while it’s sitting on the shelf. With digital text, is the website still going to be there in five years? Will the content be the same? It’s an extraordinarily ephemeral technology.”

Asked to predict how the book might evolve in the future, Turnovsky demurs.

“I’m allergic to predicting anything,” he says. “But I do think anxiety about the death of the print book has been overblown. There are still plenty of print books being published and I don’t think they are disappearing anytime soon. Still, there’s been a real shift in reading practices over the last twenty years or so. More and more people who said they’d never read anything digital are now doing it, because how can you resist? It will be interesting to see how things evolve.”