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  3. When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books wer

When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books wer

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问题     When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books were handwritten by scribes, and no two copies were exactly the same. Scribes weren’t machines; they made mistakes. With the arrival of the letterpress, thousands of identical copies could enter the marketplace simultaneously. The publication of a book became an event.
    A new set of literary workers assembled in publishing houses, collaborating with writers to perfect texts before they went on press. The verb "to finalize" became common in literary circles, expressing the permanence of printed words. Different editions still had textual variations, but books still came to be viewed as immutable objects. They were written for posterity.
    Beyond giving writers a spur to eloquence, what the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein calls "typographical fixity" served as a cultural preservative. It helped to protect original documents from corruption, providing a more solid foundation for the writing of history. It established a reliable record of knowledge, aiding the spread of science. It accelerated the standardization of everything from language to law. The preservative qualities of printed books, Ms. Eisenstein argues, may be the most important legacy of Gutenberg’s invention.
    Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change every time it’s refreshed on a screen. A book page turns into something like a Web page, able to be revised endlessly after its initial uploading. That’s an attractive development in many ways. It makes it easy for writers to correct errors and update facts. Guidebooks will no longer send travelers to restaurants that have closed. Even literary authors will be tempted to keep their works fresh. Historians and biographers will be able to revise their narratives to account for recent events or newly discovered documents.
    But as is often the case with digitization, the boon carries a bane. The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. What may be more insidious is the pressure to fiddle with books for commercial reasons. Because e-readers gather enormously detailed information on the way people read, they’ll know how quickly readers progress through different chapters, when they skip pages, and when they abandon a book. The promise of stronger sales and profits will make it hard to resist tinkering with a book in response to such signals. What will be lost is the sense of a book as a finished and complete object, a self-contained work of art.
    Not long before he died, John Updike spoke eloquently of a book’s "edges," the boundaries that give shape and integrity to a literary work and that for centuries have found their outward expression in the indelibility of printed pages. It’s those edges that give a book its solidity, allowing it to stand up to the variations of fashion and the erosions of time. And it’s those edges that seem fated to blur as the words of books go from being stamped permanently on sheets of paper to being rendered temporarily on flickering screens.
The first two paragraphs mainly show that printed books______.
选项 A、can be published in a large amount
B、are identical in each copy of one version
C、go through careful editing before publication
D、are carriers of imperishable texts
答案D
解析 第一段首先指出，古腾堡的活字发明给予了我们固定的文本。然后回顾古腾堡之前的情况：书籍由抄写员手写，没有两本书完全相同；抄写员会出错。接着指出古腾堡之后的情况：上千本完全一样的书可同时进入市场，书籍出版成为大事件。第二段首先指出出版过程：文字工作与作者合作完善文本；“定稿”一词表达了印刷文字的恒久性。然后指出：尽管不同版本间有文字变化，书籍仍被视为固定不变之物，它们是为子孙后代而写的。由此可见，这两段主要围绕古腾堡印刷术给书籍带来的固定性、恒久性展开，表明传统书籍文本的不变、不朽，[D]为正确选项。
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