“Books are humanity in print”
So I was reading the comments of blogger Ron Charles regarding a speech Dave Eggers gave regarding the physically printed word vs. electronic media, and felt the need to weigh in on this subject. I feel it is my right to have an opinion on this topic because I read, a lot.
As much as I idolize the beauty and simplicity of the $360 Kindle and its contemporaries, I will never purchase one. It is not the pricetag, either, that is holding me back. In fact, I could get the Kindle program for my iPhone for free. Even though an ebook reader would make my life simpler, organizing many books in one easy-to-use device, as well as cutting the cost of purchasing books, because many are much cheaper to buy in an electronic format than the physical book, I will never obtain one. In fact, I would go as far to say that if I were given one for free, even one filled with books, I would not use it. I simply value too much the relationship I have with a physical book.
There is something awesome about holding bound and printed paper in your hand, your eyes moving from line to line, your fingers grasping each page to turn to the next, that cannot be replaced by an advancement in technology. There is something wholesome about dragging five books in a genuine book bag with you everywhere you go, just in case you happen to have ten minutes to pull one out and read a few pages. As I walk into the room that houses the majority of my library, I am warmed by the books watching me from the shelves, calling to me to join them on a journey. The books on the shelves in the other rooms, too, remind me of past adventures I have had. I can pick up one, flip through the pages, and read my thoughts jotted on post-it notes, read marked quotes and recreate the feeling I had at the moment I read those particular words. Eventually my daughter will begin her own relationship with these books, read the same lines I have read, turn the same pages with her own fingers, have the same journeys and adventures in her own mind, and hopefully her daughter after her, and her daughter after her.
Unfortunately for technology, it is always transitory. It will be replaced by the next big thing; it will not last. The concept of the ebook reader may continue, but any particular device I might obtain will not last. Hundreds of years from now, no one will dig up an ebook reader from 2009 to see what we have been reading, the level of our learning, because that ebook reader will not exist and will have been appropriately recycled as soon as the next, newest ebook reader has come out. However, my library of physical books can be found and cherished by societies in the future, just as we have done from societies in the past, and a new relationship with the books can begin.
This is why I feel that the publishing community will eventually return to prosper, because otherwise we will end up like any lost city, with nothing for future generations to remember us by.
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.
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