I love running my hands over a new book cover, the smell of paper and pages. I’ve been known to stick my nose in a book and just inhale. And there is nothing quite like the feeling of the stacks in an old library. One of the great drawbacks of ebooks is the loss of that tactile experience. In some sense, books are not *just* the words in them, there is all sorts of other information that that we experience when reading a book – the feel of the page, the weight of the book, the flaws in the ink, the smell, the sound of a page turning. While ebooks might offer convenience and portability, if they do indeed end up replacing physical books, I will be a sad man. (I don’t think they will though). Though I guess I’ll keep my bookshelves.
In any case, Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk agrees:
[Pamuk], who has collected some 70,000 tomes in his Istanbul library, said he loved books not only for their contents, but also as treasures that he could smell and stroke.
“As a small child, I smelled books before I read them… I first got to know the smell of Europe through the books my father would bring with him back from France.” [more...]
4 Comments
Good. Now I don’t feel so weird for smelling my books. At the risk of sounding like a luddite, I just don’t see the appeal of ebooks. I am too much in love with the book as a whole. It’s not just about the words and ideas. Favorite books are precious things to be treasured, shared, given away.
There should be no tension between loving the object of the book, and recognizing the usefulness of ebooks – whether or not you choose to use ebooks yourself. Portability, choice, access, convenience, etc are all advantages of the ebook, versus permanence, tactile feedback, and a host of other technological advantages of books.
But “I prefer not to use ebooks” should not be confused with “ebooks will not be used by anyone.”
After all, I *prefer* to talk to people face-to-face, but I recognize the *utility* of the telephone…and in a sense one has very little to do with the other. I’d suggest the same could be said of ebooks.
I never thought about ebooks that way. I was stuck comparing the two. I see now though it’s just different. Access, portability, utility. I get it. Very helpful. Thanks.
Especially when you imagine this: you could spread the entire corpus of written human knowledge (pre-1923) everywhere in the world, essentially for free, using ubiquitous ebook readers already in the hands of just about every teacher in even the poorest countries in the world: that is, the mobile phone.