I’ve always loved this song:

The tune is haunting, and the main lyric ‘Where have all the cowboys gone?’ strikes a chord about how society – gender roles, notions of romance – has changed. Cowboys aren’t quite my ideal heroes, so I’d perhaps be singing ‘Where have all the gentlemen gone?’ but the sentiment is the same.

And I wonder: someday, will people be singing, ‘Where have all the old books gone?’

In a moment in time, a book is published and read. But then that moment passes, and the publisher may let the book go out of print. The book is unpublished. Any loyal or new reader must resort to scouring second-hand bookshops to find a copy. And more moments pass, and more, and too many books that once mattered to someone, many people even, become forgotten.

Take, for example, The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook by Mignon McLaughlin. Mignon was an American magazine editor who collated her aphorisms into the two-volume Complete Neurotic’s Notebook. You can find plenty of her insightful aphorisms quoted online these days; for example:

• Don’t be yourself – be someone a little nicer.
• It does not undo harm to acknowledge that we have done it; but it undoes us not to acknowledge it.
• Everybody can write; writers can’t do anything else.
• The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.
• If the second marriage really succeeds, the first one didn’t really fail.
• What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
• Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Great material, don’t you agree? And yet, if you pop onto Amazon and try to pick up a copy you’ll find yourself scanning second-hand sellers looking for anything upwards of $50 for a book dating back to 1981: the book is out of print.

Some readers find this a travesty. The brilliant website http://neglectedbooks.com/ exists to jog memories of books that are slipping into the ether. As the site states: ‘Here you’ll find lists of thousands of books that have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste.’

Is it acceptable for works to simply disappear over time – works that writers toiled over, that readers once appreciated, enjoyed? Or do we have a responsibility to preserve these books – for our generations and for all those to come? I think we do. I think we need to be investing in digitising every book in every archive we can find, so that when the pages have turned to dust, the words live on.

Ensuring that a writer’s works that were published remain published is not just about that person living on through his or her own work (though it’s worth noting that was likely part of the author’s objective in writing); it’s about giving future readers the choice in what they’d like to read. Last week, I wrote about The Great Gatsby, and the fact that it very nearly faded into obscurity when it sold poorly during F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lifetime. In fact, it was in the year after the author’s death – 16 years after its first publication – that a republication of the book parceled up with Fitzgerald’s posthumously published novel The Last Tycoon saw it receive positive reviews. Imagine the book had never been republished. Imagine American literature today if The Great Gatsby had died with its creator.

The ebook. Not necessarily the entity that will kill the book as we know it. In fact, it could become the savior of book – all books.