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Will Books Become Objects of Art? A Thought from the Kadokawa Culture Museum

On weekends, I try to walk as much as possible for my health.

This is not because I am especially disciplined. If I stay home, I really do not move, so I force myself to go outside and walk.

Yesterday, I did not have anywhere in particular that I wanted to go. But the Kadokawa Culture Museum was close enough to reach by train, so I decided to visit.

It was basically an extension of my walk.

To be honest, I was not expecting very much.

When I got there, my simplest impression was that it was a huge and slightly unusual museum of books.

When Bookshelves Become Huge, They Overwhelm People

Inside the museum, there is an enormous bookshelf.

It is less like a shelf and more like a wall.

Projection mapping is displayed across it, using the books themselves as part of the screen.

There are also many unusual and rare books on display. The place feels less like somewhere to read books and more like somewhere to look at books.

There were quite a few people inside.

But after watching for a while, I noticed something.

Nobody was really reading the books.

Of course, some people were turning pages here and there. But almost nobody was sitting quietly and reading the way people do in a library.

I was not reading either.

I was just looking up at the enormous bookshelf and thinking that it was impressive.

The only people I saw reading with real concentration were children in the manga area on the first floor.

Adults were looking at books. Children were reading manga.

It was an interesting scene.

Books May Become Objects of Art

That made me wonder about something.

In the future, books may become less like things we read and more like objects of art.

Today, we can read books on smartphones and tablets.

If the goal is only to get information, there is almost no need for paper.

Digital text is searchable. Hundreds of books can be carried without adding any weight. The font size can be changed.

In terms of convenience, digital is clearly better.

I am not someone with a strong emotional attachment to physical books.

I am not the type of person who says, “The smell of paper is what makes books special.”

Even so, when I see thousands or tens of thousands of books lined up on a giant bookshelf, I feel overwhelmed for some reason.

It makes me think about how much text humanity has written.

If the same amount of PDF files were stored in cloud storage, I probably would not feel anything.

The screen would simply say, “3.8 TB used.”

And that would be the end of it.

Data Has No Physical Presence

This may not be limited to books.

When something becomes digital, it becomes convenient.

But in exchange for that convenience, it loses its physical presence.

Ten thousand books fill a huge space.

Ten thousand ebooks fit inside a smartphone.

The amount of information may be the same, but the impression it gives to a human being is completely different.

That is why paper books may gradually lose their role as tools for transmitting information, while gaining value simply by existing as physical objects.

In that sense, they may become a little like paintings.

You can see images of the Mona Lisa anywhere on the internet.

Even so, people still go to museums to see the real thing.

Will books become similar?

Read digitally.

Visit a museum if you want to see the real object.

I do not think that kind of future would be especially strange.

I was thinking about this while looking up at the giant bookshelf.

By the way, the only area in the museum that personally caught my attention was the computer-related section.

I looked through the shelves, but the books there felt a little old.

In the end, I did not pick up a single one.

After spending all that time thinking that old books might have value as physical objects, I lost interest in the technical books simply because they were old.

At least for me, old technical books have not yet become objects of art.

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