The power of the book

Many a member of a doomsday cult has had to make a swift readjustment when, after years of pounding the pavements with the sandwich boards proclaiming “The end is nigh”, the appointed date has arrived and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have refused to emerge from the comfort of the stable. So perhaps we should resist the temptation of admitting defeat to generative artificial intelligence and celebrate products that tweak the nose of progress and shove a sharpened stick into prophecies of their imminent demise, such as the humble printed book.

Publishing has often proved a tough business. Johannes Gutenberg discovered this when, only a year after he printed the Bible that changed the world, his financiers called in their loans and the man voted by US journalists as the man of the millennium in 1999 lost his press and was effectively bankrupt. In 2007 technology threatened to shut down the traditional publishing party when Amazon launched the Kindle, and since then podcasts and streaming services have all threatened to tempt the reader away, but the book has stubbornly refused to die.

Bloomsbury has announced record results for the year, and the publisher of the Harry Potter series has been talking up the book as a value option in tough economic times. Its latest crowd-pleaser is the fantasy author Sarah J Maas, whose website promises “elements of epic adventure and heart-pounding romance”, though the faint of heart will be reassured that “they vary in setting and steaminess level”.

As the critic HL Mencken once said: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

Perhaps we should resist the temptation of admitting defeat to generative artificial intelligence