Why Physical (paper) Books will not disappear

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Heres a lovely essay on why Physical books (paper books) are wonderful things to have cluttering up your home:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121560/bibliophiles-defense-physical-books

Since bibliophiles are happy to acknowledge the absurdity, the obese impracticality of gathering more books than there are days to read them, ones collection must be about more than rememberingit must be about expectation also.

Your personal library, swollen and hulking about you, is the promise of betterment and pleasure to come, a giddy anticipation, a reminder of the joyous work left to do, a prompt for those places to which your intellect and imagination want to roam. This is how the nonreaders question Have you read all these books? manages to miss the point. The tense is all wrong: Not have you read all, but will you read all, to which, by the way, the bibliophiles answer must still be no. Agonizingly aware of the human lifespan, the collectors intention is not to read them all, but, as E.M. Forster shares in his essay My Library, simply to sit with them, aware that they, with their accumulated wisdom and charm, are waiting to be usedalthough, as Forster knows, books dont have to be used in order to be useful.9

One of the most imperishable notions ever set down about a personal library can be found inside Sven Birkertss essay Notes from a Confession. Birkerts speaks of that kind of reading which is just looking at books, of the expectant tranquility of sitting before his library: Just to see my books, to note their presence, their proximity to other books, fills me with a sense of futurity. Expectant tranquility and sense of futuritythose are what the noncollector and what the downloader of e-books does not experience, because only an enveloping presence permits them.

Im sorry but your Nook has no presence.

Forgoing physicality, readers of e-books defraud themselves of the communion which emerges from that physicality. Because if Max Frisch is correct in defining technology as the knack of so arranging the world that we dont have to experience it, then one might argue that we arent really experiencing a novel or poems on our e-readers. We might be reading themalthough I find that an e-readers scrolling and swiping are invitations to skim, not to readbut fully experiencing them is something else altogether.

You scroll and swipe and click your way through your life, scanning screens for information and interruption, screens that force you into a want of rapidity. Why youd welcome another screen in your life, another enticement to rapidity and diversion, is a question you might ask yourself. Paradise Lost will not put up with rapidity and diversion, and that is exactly why, for some of us, a physical book will always be superior reading, because it allows you to be alone with yourself, to sit in solidarity with yourself, in silence, in solitude, in the necessary sensitivity that fosters development and imagination. A physical book makes it possible to fend off the nausea roused by the electronic despotism weve let into our livesit doesnt permit blinking, swiping, scrolling, popping-up impediments to your concentration, doesnt confront it with a responsive screen trying to sell you things you dont need. On a train with only a paperback of Paradise Lost, you are forced into either an attempt at understanding and enjoyment or else an uninterrupted stare out your window. Your Kindle Fire is so named because Amazon understands that we Americans rather enjoy the hot oppression of endless choices, the arson of our calm. At the first signs of Miltons difficulty, you can nix the whole excursion and romp around with a clattering of apps.

I love my cluttered home crammed to the gills with books that I plan to eventually read.

:)

[sologdin]

nonreaders question Have you read all these books? manages to miss the point.

damn right. more typically the reader's question is where the fuck are all your books?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Sologdin,

My wife and I frequently comment on the seeming... sterility of my Dad's house due to the profound lack of books. Heck, when we travel we have to plan space for the books we bring with us and will aquire while away from home.

:)

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

I'm pretty sure this is the same rationale given by the people on Hoarders.

It's true that they may no longer be able to pet, or even find, the flattened, dessicated corpses of their dozens upon dozens of feline companions or use any of those sixteen broken McIntosh computers they have sitting out in the garage, but its those fond memories of kittens once petted, and games of Piccadilly pairs once played, that really gives them comfort and solace.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Nestor,

In my, the Author's, and Milton's opinion a book is very different from a dead cat:

But I trust youll agree that the possession of books is not identical to the possession of shoes: Someone with a thousand books is someone you want to talk to; someone with a thousand shoes is someone you suspect of belonging to the Kardashian clan. Books are not objects in the same way that shoes are objects. This is what Milton means in his sublime Areopagitica, as necessary now as it was in 1644, when he asserted that books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. Potency of life, purest efficacy, living intellect: These are the world-enhancing elements you have in any well-made book worth reading.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

Nestor,

In my, the Author's, and Milton's opinion a book is very different from a dead cat:

Take a person surrounded with hundreds of unread books.

And now take a person surrounded by dozens of flattened, desiccated cat corpses.

Who is the more interesting person?

I rest my case.

[sologdin]

I'm pretty sure this is the same rationale given by the people on Hoarders.

It's true that they may no longer be able to pet, or even find, the flattened, dessicated corpses of their dozens upon dozens of feline companions or use any of those sixteen broken McIntosh computers they have sitting out in the garage, but its those fond memories of kittens once petted, and games of Piccadilly pairs once played, that really gives them comfort and solace.

haha touché! i suppose that my place, with its thousands of books along the walls, must appear as indistinguishable from a hoarder's joint when contrasted with the elegant habitat of the subliterate.

[Papirolle]

Beautifully written! He perfectly describes the feeling of just standing there and looking at them. That's something I've tried to explain to others but never succeeded at.

And also how a screen is more stressful to read on, with its percentages, short pages and number of pages left.

I'm so happy! I just bought 12 new books by Gene Wolfe and now I have to figure out how to fit them into the bookshelf with his other books I have. :D

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

haha touché! i suppose that my place, with its thousands of books along the walls, must appear as indistinguishable from a hoarder's joint when contrasted with the elegant habitat of the subliterate.

Of course, literacy is not the issue. The issue isn't between those who read and those who do not, but, per the article, those who read properly, which in the author's mind, requires some strange alchemy involving wood pulp and binding glue. This is of course, absurd, and appears to be nothing more than the author's attempt to pathologize the fact that he doesn't get the same, comforting experience reading the same book in two different mediums.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Nestor,

To me reading a book is more than the mere transmission of information. It is a tactile, olifactory, even sensual experience. Reading on an eReader is simply a lesser experience in my opinion.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

Nestor,

To me reading a book is more than the mere transmission of information. It is a tactile, olifactory, even sensual experience. Reading on an eReader is simply a lesser experience in my opinion.

Everyone is entitled to their own idiosyncrasies. If people feel like they can only extract maximum value out of a story if it's printed on papyrus and read in front of a roaring fire with a fine red wine and a few pieces of dark chocolate - who am I disagree?

What I object to is the idea that idiosyncratic personal preferences about how 'best' to read a story can be generalized into some kind of universal truth about the superiority of reading printed ink off of dead trees. It's silly.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Nestor,

Fine. I see This is not as a condemnation of eReaders and more an apologia for those of us who will not convert to eReaders.

[red snow]

I think they should also stick around because there's a better chance future civilizations will find and learn from them. The digital dark age terrifies me in terms of leaving a legacy for the far flung future.

We should carve our greatest works/knowledge into stone still, as far as I'm concerned. So much will be forever lost due to the lack of writing and or permanent things to write upon.

[Papirolle]

A person's bookshelf says a lot about that person. If I am visiting someone, I always look at their bookshelves (of course). Not only which books they have, but how they have ordered them (if at all), and in what condition they are. I am inevitably drawn to bookshelves. I can't help it. A home with no books in it is a strange and sterile place.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

I read this more as an argument explaining book hoarding and why people prefer than a rant about how everything is better. At the least, you should give the author credit for not attempting to state it as a universal truth. He's not being unreasonable.

From the article:

"Forgoing physicality, readers of e-books defraud themselves of the communion which emerges from that physicality. Because if Max Frisch is correct in defining technology as the knack of so arranging the world that we dont have to experience it, then one might argue that we arent really experiencing a novel or poems on our e-readers. We might be reading them although I find that an e-readers scrolling and swiping are invitations to skim, not to read but fully experiencing them is something else altogether."

His position is that you can't "really experience" a novel or poem on an e-reader.

Because, of course, the "real experience" of a poem is somehow bound to wood pulp.

I wonder what he thinks of people who WRITE books on computers. Can an author "really experience" the poem they're writing if they don't scrawl it on vellum with a quill?

[Switchback the Second]

I'm a converted paper book lover. I resisted ebooks for years, and always argued the same kind of arguments I still see from paper book lovers - love the smell/feel, love having a towering bookshelf full of beautiful books to look at, love the idea that there is always a book on that shelf just waiting for me to pick it up, etc.

I look back on those days as a bit silly now to be honest. When I finally took the plunge on ebooks, and gave them an honest chance, I was hooked almost immediately. The arguments I used to make so fervently just seemed ridiculous. I now MUCH prefer ebooks. The comfort of reading any book on a tiny, lightweight device trumps (for me) having to hold pages at awkward angles, needing to fight with large hardbacks or huge, fat paperbacks. The knowledge that I have hundreds of books on me at any given time (just sitting there in my backpack) trumps the hundreds I had taking up so much room in my house. I've come to realize that the smell/feel of a paper book I used to think was so important pales in comparison to the actual story I'm reading, so that loss took very little time to get over.

Again, many people still love their paper books, but some of the arguments in favor of them are very subjective, and I often tell my friends/family who are resistant to ebooks to at least give them an honest chance. Some will continue to resist, and will die with a paper book in their hand, but many more have taken the plunge and become converts as well.

At the end of the day, we all like stories. Read 'em how you like.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

StS,

The argument in favor of any media is subjective. The argument for eReaders over paper books is subjective. Where do you get the impression paperbook readers think their experience is objectively better than those of eReader users?

[Myshkin]

haha touché! i suppose that my place, with its thousands of books along the walls, must appear as indistinguishable from a hoarder's joint when contrasted with the elegant habitat of the subliterate.

I'll say this once, but you're not to repeat it; I like you.

For me, as Scott said earlier, reading is more than just ingesting and understanding the words on a page. I like the feeling of the paper on my fingers, and I love the smell of a book, particularly an old book. Used book stores are the best smelling places on earth. And as the article suggests, I love to look at my books, love being surrounded by them. Does that make me a weirdo? Probably, but I don't care. Plus I get to impress people who come to my house with the awesome collection of art lining my walls.

A person's bookshelf says a lot about that person. If I am visiting someone, I always look at their bookshelves (of course). Not only which books they have, but how they have ordered them (if at all), and in what condition they are. I am inevitably drawn to bookshelves. I can't help it. A home with no books in it is a strange and sterile place.

I order them by country or region of origin, and by original language.

[Switchback the Second]

StS,

The argument in favor of any media is subjective. The argument for eReaders over paper books is subjective. Where do you get the impression paperbook readers think their experience is objectively better than those of eReader users?

You're hard to have a discussion with on this topic, you're always so defensive/combative. I don't think I said " paperbook readers think their experience is objectively better than those of eReader users" anywhere in my post?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

StS,

Here, you comment that:

Again, many people still love their paper books, but some of the arguments in favor of them are very subjective, and I often tell my friends/family who are resistant to ebooks to at least give them an honest chance. Some will continue to resist, and will die with a paper book in their hand, but many more have taken the plunge and become converts as well.

All of the arguments in favor of paper v. digital and digital v. paper are subjective. Hence, I'm curious as to why you think that sujectivity is of particular relevance to this discussion?