Books, said James Russell Lowell, "are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind." If this be so, then the past year has seen an entire swarm of books released for purposes of cross-pollination.

Indeed, the publishing industry continues to release multiple thousands of new titles each year. If Americans are reading what they are purchasing, this society has become the most literate culture in the history of the human race. On the other hand, the wheat and the chaff are sadly mixed together in the avalanche of released volumes.

The very existence of books has been called into question by those high-tech prophets of the electronic age. Ever since the rise of television, pundits and futurists have suggested that the age of the book would give way to the cathode-ray tube or to some other means of electronic transmission.

Preachers have long noted the connection between the sermon and the written word. Indeed, we can hardly imagine a divorce between books and preachers. Our books become to us not only tools of the trade, but companions in the preparation of sermons and messages. We should take careful note then of the new volume by Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Faber and Faber). Birkerts, an established American author whose essays and reviews have appeared in some of America's most prestigious periodicals, has come to conclude that the decline of print culture has produced lamentable results in the current age.

Literature has been exchanged for technical manuals, and an increasing number of Americans have completely exchanged electronic culture for printed literature. As Birkerts notes: "I am not going to argue against the power and usefulness of electronic technologies. Nor am I going to suggest that we try to turn back or dismantle what we have wrought in the interests of an intensified relation to meaning. But I would urge that we not fall all over ourselves in our haste to filter all of our experience through circuitries. We are in some danger of believing that the speed and wizardry of our gadgets have freed us from the sometimes arduous work of turning pages in silence."

It is the process of turning pages in silence which is among the central disciplines of any preacher's life and ministry. Birkerts presents a threatening vision of what he calls "the wholesale wiring of America," which would replace meaning communicated on the written page with the nanosecond transmission of electronic circuitry.

On the other hand, there are also those who celebrate the electronic age as a new era of information accessibility. Chief among these boosters of the electronic revolution is Nicholas Negroponte. Professor of Media Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Negroponte is also the founder of the MIT media lab, which has become one of the most famous technological think tanks in America.

If Birkerts has produced an elegy lamenting the loss of what Gutenberg wrought, Negroponte hails the arrival of the fully digital age. His volume, Being Digital (Alfred A. Knopf), is marked by unapologetic boosterism.