When I was a chemistry student at Richmond College in 1960, my prize possession was a new Pickett slide rule. Unlike my previous slide rules, some of them quite expensive and made from exotic woods to insure stability in various conditions of temperature and humidity, this slide rule was a new aluminum alloy with a teflon-like coating which was impervious to humidity and had a coefficient of expansion far less than the margin of error in reading the scales. It did not have to be adjusted or calibrated periodically because it was summer or because it was raining that day. I was proud to have it, grateful to my parents who bought it for me, and I used it well. Today it is a dinosaur among calculating instruments. For less than a tenth the cost of that slide rule, any junior highschool student today can buy a low-end Texas Instruments scientific or business calculator with a thousand times the power of any slide rule. Today slide rules have gone the way of disk turntables: no one can seriously imagine using one again.

As hard as it is to imagine for us, it will be that way in educational media technology: books are slide rules on the way to becoming dinosaurs. Quickly, books will acquire the same status the last slide rule I purchased a few years ago. It had belonged to a TVA engineer and must have cost the equivalent of a good stereo system in 1960's dollars. I bought it at Federal Surplus Property Disposal in Nashville for twenty-five cents. It was made irrelevant and worthless by a new and superior technology. In its day, it had been for that engineer a source of power and pride. I knew that sense of power. I had belonged to a elite group who knew how to use a slide rule, and just to have it laying on top of my chemistry text was intimidating to some students. "Slip-stick" jockeys were regarded as brainy intellectuals, a technological elite set apart by our arcane calculator. The Sputnik craze and our nascent NASA program brought in its wake both demand and prestige for science students and slip-sticks were our great badges and symbols.

Similar social approbations have surrounded books for half a millenium. Books have been the surest evidences of education, learning, culture. No home was so poor as the home without books; no person so deprived as one unread and unlettered. So high was our esteem of books, that government and university alike invested hundreds of millions of dollars in support of the writing of books and in their archival preservation. Libraries became to learning what military arsenals became to warfare: the fundamental repositories sine qua non. Our culture bent itself to the knowledge contained in books and the skills for acquiring and retrieving that knowledge. Experts in this process acquired social status as writers, professors, lecturers. Credibility was vouchsafed in instant image by speaking against a background of shelves of books. Professors were never photographed in class or lab working but at their desks with hundreds of books behind them.

The book was the thing. Knowledge was power. Books held knowledge, and a person with many books held great power. In a world of democratic publishing and paperback editions any man might be a Prospero with magic in his books. The book world has as surely ended as has the world of slide rules. In 1960, I could not imagine that my new slide rule would so quickly become both useless and irrelevant. In 1960 we still had not heard of Walmart and hand held calculators were a decade away. Today Walmart not only sells calculators but Macintosh and IBM computers along with software and CD-ROMs alongside country music CDs. A couple of months ago, an ad from the American Bible Society offered me a single CD-ROM that contained more books than my entire biblical studies library and at a price lower than the current purchase price of one four-volume reference set in that library. It no longer makes sense for me to purchase biblical studies references in print-book format. That world is over. It is over in biblical studies, over in classics, over in law. Both current and historical information will increasingly be available and accessed in electronic format.

That day is not far off; it is not a speculation. It is already at hand. Books, like slide rules, are dinosaurs.

Gerald L. Smith

Sewanee, TN

November 1994