In the very active discourse surrounding books and the future, bookservatives claim the mantle of Johannes Gutenberg every chance they get. And it makes me want to retch. People who claim to have an imagination formed in the full amplitude of Western cultural history and a sensibility sharpened to the keen edge of Occam's razor invoke Gutenberg like a patron saint—thereby demonstrating a sense of history on par with ancient bards and twentieth-century propagandists. "The form of the book hasn't changed fundamentally in five hundred years," they tell us. It's like saying the form of the wheel hasn't changed fundamentally since the Bronze Age. Which is true enough—until you try putting a wagon wheel on your car.

What then is the essence of Gutenberg's "legacy," you ask? My first impulse is to say that the question is wrong in kind. History doesn't furnish us with unchanging essences or Platonic ideals. It furnishes us with a broken world, and imposes the mandate to heal and to make. "Only connect," the ethic Forster expresses in Howard's End, is a useful motto for the Angel of History as she confronts the storm of progress.

But to press further on the question of legacy, Gutenberg's story would seem to offer an example not of reliance on hollow notions of continuity, but of openness to risk, to change.

Gutenberg was a goldsmith. He was an entrepreneur. He was a failure and a schlub. If he were alive today, he'd be an engineer trying to make an electronic thing that looks and acts like a trusty old printed book, only does more stuff at lower cost than hardcovers and paperback originals. And he'd hack it together brilliantly—only to have his ideas stolen from him by his corporate partners as he gets ready to take the thing to market.

Reading is bigger than print, bigger than Gutenberg. You've got your market share to protect, your appointment to justify? Do it on the merits, not by invoking some false and hollow historical imperative that does not exist.