The book multiplies the book.
Television, computer database, Xerox, word processor, tape, and VCR are not symbiotic with literature and its values in the way that print was, and new ways of acquiring, storing, and transmitting information are signaling the end of a conception of writing and reading oriented to the printed book and institutionalized as literature. Each time that literature appears in one of these new contexts it encounters the world and feels its pressures on ways of thinking and doing.
The concept of copyright could appear only in a print society, since in oral and even manuscript cultures, texts never stabilize sufficiently to become an objective property. The wheel will have come full circle when in some predictable future copyright will disappear as the electronic database destabilizes the individual text once again.
In the long run the shift, which is at the center of the transformation to postindrustrialization, from a book to an electronic culture, of which the literacy crisis is one major symptom, marks the end of the old literature.
