The Act of Reading
E-book technology is getting better, more accessible and more affordable with each new application and iteration. It's portable. You don't have to cart along hardbacks on vacation. You have the best seller of your choice at your fingertips. E-readers open up a whole new way to read and likely introduce reading to a new audience. This is all good, but only to an extent.
I worry that E-books will replace real books and that would be a serious loss. Reading is a ritual. And the book, itself, is what matters most. I appreciate its weight in my hands. I love the anticipation of opening the cover and losing myself in a story. I resist the urge to flip to the last chapter to make sure it all turns out in the end. It's the act of reading the physical object that makes it special. I just can't picture curling up on the couch with my Kindle.
As a reader, I am curious about what others read. Books offer a glimpse of who we are. A glance at my coffee table or bookshelves will tell you a lot about me and what I care about. You'll only get a fragment of who I am from a peek at my E-reader.
We share books with our friends. We pass the books we loved as kids to our own children. We lug our books with us from move to move, and don't feel we are fully home until our books are back on their shelves. Can an E-reader capture that sense of home?
By all means, bring on the technology. Give us new ways - lots of ways - to consume information. But don't throw out the old to make way for the new. I prefer my next best seller the old-fashioned way.
Comments
Completely agree with you, Lisa. I'm a librarian in my spare time, and seeing the joy on a kid's face - or an adult's for that matter - when they find a new book or an old one they'd been looking for is not going to be easy to replace with ebooks.
I couldn't agree more. Holding a good book is like holding a key to another world. Books have always been a significant part of my life. Now that I'm about to have my own child, I'm so excited about sharing the joy of reading with him. As we line the shelves in the nursery with classic and new children's books, I can't imagine a world where stories only exist electronically.
I've read a lot about the concept of making e-readers "feel" more like actual books, so this is definitely not lost on the people pushing the ebooks and creating the products that bring them to us.
I know the Kindle is huge and Barnes & Noble is really pushing their Nook, but I am not yet ready to curl up with either just yet. Your sentiment is shared by so many. It will be interesting to watch.
Never fear, reports of the death of the printed page are premature. The same way radio didn't replace TV, ebooks will never fully replace books. As with all new technologies they will find their niche and cater to the things where they excel.
Like newspapers for example. They get read once and thrown away, so saving thousands of trees by publishing on an electronic platform is brilliant. Or the OED maybe, too big to carry around? You can access it on your electronic reader.
But for the most part, there will always be the used book store in town where you can find a good hard copy to curl up with at night.
Recommended reading: SuperFreakonomics. Dubner and Levitt are back...and this time they have a thesis.
Anson, I sadly disagree. The eBooks revolution is not the same as the TV revolution. eBooks are a new way to consume the written word. They will replace printed books like Gutenberg's press replaced scribes and scolls.
Paper books will become an art form like portrait painting after the advent of photography. Paper will will become a labor of love. An object of craft. To have a book will be to have a piece of art.
I'm not saying that you can't curl up on the couch with your favorite book, but the days of buying cheap novels is fast coming to a close.
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