When I think about how books would be different if they had some of the future technology, I think about how many more books at that time would have been published with color and photos. Before the printing press was invented, people wrote books and drew pictures by hand.Think about how much easier it would have been for these books to have some form of color or picture in them had they had the same technology we have today. When I think of books with pictures and colors, I think about children’s books. Before printing was invented, children were not able to go through a book and look at all the wonderful pictures. I try to imagine my childhood without these colors and pictures and I cannot. I can only imagine the wonderful children’s books that would have been created if people had the ability to create them during that time.
While you say it would be interesting to bring color books to the past, the same could be said for now. Many novels are devoid of color, even pictures. Children’s books would be considered an exception, due to the colors and pictures being unnecessary to keep attention. Textbooks tend to have colored pictures to better illustrate a topic. However, even Howard’s The Book, while it has illustrations and diagrams, is devoid of color, in complete monochrome aside from the cover. So while our technology now could easily put color into books, we do not.
The whole issue here is how important color is to the material in question. Sure, it is nice to see colored pictures in a novel. However, for the most part it is only a nice feature. The reader does not lose sense of the story if there are no colored pictures present. If the book in question is a textbook designed to teach a subject, or a children’s book created to tell a story to younger generations, then the situation is different. In that case, color serves much more of a utility purpose, and its presence has a much greater value.