There’s something about holding a printed book that can’t be satisfied by the cold, hard slab that is an e-reader. I love the smell of books, old and new. I love the feel of their pages. I like to run my fingers over an embossed cover. Sometimes I even write little side notes in the margins. I also like reading what other people have written in books, what words they defined or what themes they discovered. I like to arrange the books on my shelf, sometimes by color, sometimes by size. With an electronic book, none of this is possible. Sure it may be conveniently portable, but I don’t own many books that aren’t. If I traveled more, perhaps an e-reader would be more practical for me. But for my life as it is right now, the printed copy will do just fine.
I relate this debate, printed vs. digital, to the way my parents reminisce about album artwork. My dad tells me stories about how he would buy a new record and spend all day reading every single word from front to back, cherishing the artwork as if it was a famous painting. With today’s downloadable music and even with the smaller size of CDs, album artwork is taking a backseat (if it even exists at all). I’m afraid that this will eventually happen to books as technology continues to emerge.
