As students turn to the Internet and online text in a digital age, author Sven Birkerts questioned the value of book culture and asked 40 Boston University community members to consider the value of hard-copy material in the BU Castle last night.

Speaking about The Gutenberg Elegies: the Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, Birkerts said there is a need to question the fall of book culture as well as the gain-loss dynamic behind the rise of the computer age.

“Books will have a specialized use,” the Harvard University professor said. “There will always be a culture of scholars, and there will always be libraries.”

Birkerts wrote The Gutenberg Elegies — an observation of books’ place in a changing society. He explained his horror at students’ excessive use of informational tools like Wikipedia.org that eliminate the vital process of book culture discovery. Providing users with fast access to information, these quick search engines take away from book culture’s public nature, he said.

Although he said books will never become obsolete, Birkerts said reading and researching will become innately private processes, changing from print use in bookstores and libraries to online media.

English professor Andrew Stauffer, who helped organize the event, urged BU students to consider the Internet’s impact on printed books.

“It’s crucial, because printed books are [people’s] inheritance,” he said in an email before Birkerts’s lecture, “so anything that affects the book goes to the heart of their legacy as thinking humans.”

Stauffer said there are positive aspects of digitizing books, explaining that books can become more “searchable” and “accessible.” Despite allowing people to change “the kinds of questions [they] ask,” he said there are also disadvantages to this technology.

“No one knows how long digital files can last, or which books will be scanned, or what will happen to the printed book once libraries go digital,” he said. “There is a lot to be gained, but also a lot that could be lost.”

Stauffer, whose students were required to read The Gutenberg Elegies and attend the event, said the contrast of the Birkerts’s book has changed since its publication in 1994, years before today’s world of computers and digital society.

“I knew a lot had changed in the decade since [the book] was first published,” he said, “so I thought it would be great to hear his take on current technologies and the future of reading in the 21st century.”

College of Communication and College of Arts and Sciences junior Gianna Rey, a student in Stauffer’s class, said Birkerts’ theories were relevant to today’s information age.

“[Birkerts] founded his concern in the rapidly changing technology . . . and emphasized that the world is not doomed,” she said.

Other audience members noted the importance of questioning technological advancements in how material is read.

“Things have changed,” 2004 COM graduate Patrick Kennedy said. “Hopefully, it’s not quite as dire. It’s good that someone is at least asking questions.”