I would not minimize the digital divide, which separates the computerized world from the rest, nor would I underestimate the importance of traditional books.

Digital data are more fragile than printed material.

It's important to make clear to all the schools at Harvard the central role of the library.

The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet.

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

I would not minimize the digital divide, which separates the computerized world from the rest, nor would I underestimate the importance of traditional books.