Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Battles. The Library Beyond the Book. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2014. 176 p. ISBN 978-0674725034. $17.97

Abstract

Schnapp and Battles’ The Library Beyond the Book is a visually and intellectually playful look at what libraries can become and what they can do as humanity traverses the threshold of the information age. The authors wink at how the online information bomb of modernity intersects with the physical space of a library. Schnapp and Battles are clearly critical of the post-book visioning and “excessive exuberance of techno-utopians” (56), and those who dwell in the “constraints of bibliophilia and bookish nostalgia” (18). Rather than blowing book stacks to bits as one might envisage from the title, the authors instead focus . . .