Two legendary figures from vastly different corners of the culture of letters offer their reflections on the state of the book. Historian Robert Darnton, now serving as Director of the Harvard University Library, writes in Publisher's Weekly about the book's premature terminal diagnosis. And at the BN Review, editor and novelist Daniel Menaker enumerates the dysfunctions of big-time publishing—taking pains to point out that the illness resides not in the book itself but in the grandiose business model of twentieth-century frontlist hardcover publishing.

In a series of laconic observations, Menaker enumerates the symptoms of bloat, complaisance, and wishful thinking that left big-time publishing susceptible to the current crisis—which the Internet and the emergence of the networked text precipitated, but did not cause. Unrealistic profit expectations, ritualistic lunches, carefully tended cultural hierarchies that conceal or deny Darwinian dynamics of taste, the presumption of significance—these, and not the proliferation of pixels, lead to the disestablishment of the frontlist and perhaps the eclipse of the editor as privileged mandarin. And yet Menaker is reassuringly sanguine about the future of the imagination, if not the business. "A book is still and I hope always will be, in pixels or in print, an object of reverence in our culture," he concludes. "And helping to bring a good book to light has great rewards."

If Menaker speaks from experience about the excesses of modern publishing, Robert Darnton's frame of reference is a longer one. A specialist in the history of the book in the time of the French Revolution, he knows that crises and cultural conflicts are the stuff from which the life of the mind is made. "Every age has been an age of information," he observes, "each in its own way." Electronic text, he reminds us, still makes up a tiny fraction of the stream of letters. What matters in the life of the mind, he contends, is always already the extent and manner of our participation in it. Conceptions of authorship and publishing have changed repeatedly with changes in culture and technology, and yet we retain a sense of continuity. What's the history of this disposition? By reflecting upon it, Darnton argues, we can take better measure of our own position.

Menaker reminds us, however, that even if the word endures, its transformations will always be painful to those invested in current forms. And Darnton has investments of his own: his essay in PW promotes his own new tome, The Case for Books, which appears under the Public Affairs imprint in October.