The death of the book has frequently been foretold, and the babble is rising to a clamour. Never mind the relative failure of the e-book: we are bombarded with portents such as falling literacy, shrinking publishers’ lists, increasing sales of second-hand books at the expense of new books, and so on.

But now Umberto Eco, the Italian scholar, has come to the rescue. For he has given a thoughtful speech on the future of books at the newly-opened Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.

I’ve had a soft spot for Eco (pictured) since stumbling across his collection of essays, Travels in Hyperreality, nearly twenty years ago. Anyone who can philosophise on how wearing jeans can shape your thinking deserves respect.

Eco’s speech is reprinted in full in Al-Ahram, the Cairo-based newspaper that is published in Arabic, French and English. And Eco has some very interesting things to say:

I belong to the people who still believe that printed books have a future and that all fears à propos of their disappearance are only the last example of other fears, or of milleniaristic terrors about the end of something, the world included.

… books will remain indispensable, not only for literature but for any circumstances in which one needs to read carefully, not only in order to receive information but also to speculate and to reflect about it.

And as anyone who has attempted to read an e-book will verify, monitor screens have limitations.

After having spent 12 hours at a computer console, my eyes are like two tennis balls, and I feel the need of sitting down comfortably in an armchair and reading a newspaper, or maybe a good poem. Therefore, I think that computers are diffusing a new form of literacy, but they are incapable of satisfying all the intellectual needs they are stimulating.

… Even if your computer has solar batteries, you cannot easily read it while lying in a hammock. Books are still the best companions for a shipwreck, or for the day after the night before. Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further improved because they are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife, spoon or scissors.

How beautifully put, and reassuring to read.

NB The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is a major landmark in Alexandria, built close to the site of the original Ancient Library in the Brucheion. The main library building stretches over 11 levels and by 2020, its projected capacity will be eight million books in six specialised libraries.

It also has three museums, seven research centres, two permanent exhibitions, six art galleries, a Planetarium, an Exploratorium and a Conference Centre.