【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 end up in permanent collections, either private or public, will probably only be available as ebooks within a few years. Hardback and trade paperbacks for “serious” nonfiction and fiction will surely last longer. Perhaps it will bee the mark of an author to reckon with that he or she is still published in hard copy.[D] As for children’s books, who knows? Children’s books are like dog food in that the purchasers are not the consumers, so the market (and the marketing) is inherently strange.[E] For clues to the book’s future, let’s look at some examples of technological change and see what happened to the old technology.[F] One technology replaces another only because the new technology is better, cheaper, or both. The greater the difference, the sooner and more thoroughly the new technology replaces the old. Printing with moveable type on paper dramatically reduced the cost of producing a book pared with the oldfashioned ones handwritten on vellum, which es from sheepskin. A Bible—to be sure, a long book—required vellum made from 300 sheepskins and countless manhours of labor. Before printing arrived, a Bible cost more than a middleclass house. There were perhaps 50,000 books in all of Europe in 1450. By 1500 there were 10 million.[G] But while printing quickly caused the hand written book to die out, handwriting lingered on (繼續(xù)存在) well into the 16th century. Very special books are still occasionally produced on vellum, but they are oneofakind show pieces.[H]Sometimes a new technology doesn’t drive the old one out, but only parts of it while forcing the rest to evolve. The movies were widely predicted to drive live theater out of the marketplace, but they didn’t, because theater turned out to have qualities movies could not reproduce. Equally, TV was supposed to replace movies but, again, did not.[I] Movies did, however, fatally impact some parts of live theater. And while TV didn’t kill movies, it did kill secondrate pictures, shorts, and cartoons.[J] Nor did TV kill radio. Comedy and drama shows (“Jack Benny,” “Amos and Andy,” “The Shadow”) all migrated to television. But because you can’t drive a car and watch television at the same time, rush hour became radio’s prime, while music, talk, and news radio greatly enlarged their audiences. Radio is today a very different business than in the late 1940s and a much larger one.[K] Sometimes old technology lingers for centuries because of its symbolic power. Mounted cavalry (騎兵) replaced the chariot (二輪戰(zhàn)車) on the battlefield around 1000 BC. But chariots maintained their place in parades and triumphs right up until the end of the Roman Empire 1,500 years later. The sword hasn’t had a military function for a hundred years, but is still part of an officer’s fulldress uniform, precisely because a sword always symbolized “an officer and a gentleman.”[L] Sometimes new technology is a little cranky (不穩(wěn)定的) at first. Television repairman was a mon occupation in the 1950s, for instance. And so the old technology remains as a backup. Steamships captured the North Atlantic passenger business from sail in the 1840s because of its much greater speed. But steamships didn’t lose their sails until the 1880s, because early marine engines had a nasty habit of breaking down. Until ships became large enough (and engines small enough) to mount two engines side by side, they needed to keep sails. (The high cost of steam and the lesser need for speed kept the majority of the world’s ocean freight moving by sail until the early years of the 20th century.)[M] Then there is the fireplace. Central heating was present in every upperand middleclass home by the second half of the 19th century. But functioning fireplaces remain to this day a powerful selling point in a house or apartment. I suspect the reason is a deeprooted love of the fire. Fire was one of the earliest major technological advances for humankind, providing heat, protection, and cooked food (which is much easier to cat and digest). Human control of fire goes back far enough (over a million years) that evolution could have produced a genetic leaning towards fire as a central aspect of human life.[N] Books—especially books the average person could afford—haven’t been around long enough to produce evolutionary change in humans. But they have a powerful hold on many people nonetheless, a hold extending far beyond their literary content. At their best, they are works of art and there is a tactile(觸覺的)pleasure in books necessarily lost in ebook versions. The ability to quickly thumb through pages is also lost. And a room with books in it induces, at least in some, a feeling not dissimilar to that of a fire in the fireplace on a cold winter’s night.[O] For these reasons I think physical books will have a longer existence as a mercial product than some currently predict. Like swords, books have symbolic power. Like fireplaces, they induce a sense of fort and warmth. And, perhaps, similar to sails, they make a useful backup for when the lights go out.注意：此部分試題請在答題卡2上作答。46. Authors still published in printed versions will be considered important ones.47. Some people are still in favor of printed books because of the sense of touch they can provide.48. The radio business has changed greatly and now attracts more listeners.49. Contrary to many people’s prediction of its death, the film industry survived.50. Remarkable changes have taken place in the book business.51. Old technology sometimes continues to exist because of its reliability.52. The increase of ebook sales will force the book