In an essay on the importance of scholarly books, Peter J. Dougherty, director of the Princeton University Press in New Jersey and a 33-year veteran of the publishing industry, contemplates the impact of
The Mathematical Theory of Communication, a small tract by C. E. Shannon published in 1948 that, he says, “explained how words, sounds, and images could be converted into blips and sent electronically [and thus] presaged the digital revolution in communications.”
Dougherty finds irony in the fact that the university press, the very institution that brought Shannon’s technological tract to a broad audience, now faces the possible demise—what the Czech economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter called the “creative destruction”—of the print book itself because of the very technologies spawned by Shannon’s profoundly influential book.
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