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5 MYTHS ABOUT THE 'INFORMATION AGE'
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By Robert Darnton

Confusion about the nature of the so-called information age has led
to a state of collective false consciousness. It's no one's fault but
everyone's problem, because in trying to get our bearings in cyberspace,
we often get things wrong, and the misconceptions spread so rapidly that

they go unchallenged. Taken together, they constitute a font of
proverbial nonwisdom. Five stand out:
1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print

each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear
worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last
October 1 — 800 new works were published. The latest figures for the

United States cover only 2009, and they do not distinguish between new
books and new editions of old books. But the total number, 288,355,
suggests a healthy market, and the growth in 2010 and 2011 is likely to

be much greater. Moreover, these figures, furnished by Bowker, do not
include the explosion in the output of "nontraditional" books—a further
764,448 titles produced by self-publishing authors and "micro-niche"
print-on-demand enterprises. And the book business is booming in

developing countries like China and Brazil. However it is measured, the
population of books is increasing, not decreasing, and certainly not
dying.

2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement
is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages.
But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and

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Darnton R. 5 Myths about Information Age / Robert Darnton. – Available at:
http://chronicle.com/article/5-Myths-About-the-Information/127105/