In an age of ebook readers and digital downloads, it is easy to imagine a time when printed books will vanish, rendered extinct by the Internet revolution. But such forecasts miss the mark, say Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles. Future bookshelves will not be wholly virtual, and libraries will thrive--although not in their present form. Throughout their history, libraries have been sites for new media, new technical demands, and new cultural forms. Schnapp and Battles combine study of the library's cultural history with a record of institutional and technical innovation at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of the digital humanities. They gather these currents in The Library Beyond the Book," exploring what libraries have been in the past to speculate on what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels. From the Mausoleum--a place to commemorate the dead and their wisdom--to the Database, a container for accessible, infinitely expansible information, past library forms will reappear, nowhere in isolation, but remixed into new institutional forms. The authors also imagine libraries untethered from collections, from Civic Spaces to freestanding Reading Rooms, which can serve as alternatives to closed and controlled versions of the archive.

Library types have been mixed and matched in the past, and remix is the most plausible future scenario. Speculative and provocative, The Library Beyond the Book" explains book culture in a networked world where the physical and the virtual blend with increasing intimacy.