writerjenn

With the coming of the e-book age, the reading public is often seen as divided into two camps: those who will quickly adopt the new technology because a story is a story and e-reading is much more convenient; and those who will resist until paper books are pried from their cold rigid fingers.

It's true that a story is a story, no matter how the text is presented (although I think the format does have some influence, however subtle). We have stories with us today that began in the days of oral tradition, were written down when that became possible, and will probably continue their future lives on screens--maybe with animation and hyperlinks. Story-telling itself is durable.

However, there is one aspect of the paper-book camp that I haven't seen discussed. Often, this camp is associated with nostalgia: paper-preferring readers are assumed to love the feel and smell of books, their weight, the turn of the page, because all of that is familiar; it's what they grew up with. And I'm sure that is one element at work.

But there's an additional reason for people to value books as physical objects:

People love things.

That is, human beings enjoy tangible objects. We have knickknacks and jewelry and collectibles and decorative pieces. We amass collections of objects. We buy things that do nothing but sit on a shelf. Some theorize this is a relic of our hunter-gatherer past (and that it also explains recreational shopping), but who knows--the fact remains that we like to own things we can touch and look at and pick up and hold. And this is one appeal of a book--apart from whether one even reads the book, it's a physical object that can be owned and collected, given as a gift, inscribed. This physical appeal is important: why else would book designers exist? Why would we bother with foil or sparkles on covers, with gilt edging, with different paper textures, with keyhole covers?

Some books mean more to us than just the story between their covers. We may say things like this:
"This is my grandfather's copy of Tom Sawyer."
"This is the copy of Little Women my mother gave me on my tenth birthday--and here's her inscription."
"This is a first edition of my favorite book."
"This is the copy of On the Road I read in college--and to me, this is the 'real' cover; no other edition feels right."
"Here's my old copy of To Kill A Mockingbird, with my notes in the margins!"

The book doesn't even have to be associated with anyone we know. I treasure my copy of Five Little Peppers inscribed by my mother "for making all A's on your report card" when I was eight years old, the book of Christmas songs given me by my great-grandfather the same year (in which he, charmingly, misspelled my name as "Jenifer"), and the first edition of Jack Kerouac's The Town and the City my husband once gave me as a gift. But I also love the markings of total strangers, such as this inscription in my used copy of Penrod: "Raymond from Eldridge / Christmas 1914." I found this nearly century-old copy of Penrod in a used bookstore, and I amuse myself by wondering who Raymond and Eldridge were, and what happened to them. The used copy of Main Street that I picked up for $1.95 is falling apart now, but I haven't replaced it yet because someone named Steve wrote his name and address on the flyleaf, and wrote priceless little bits of marginalia. For example, when the narrator remarks that the character Bea listened to her new phonograph "with rapture like that of cattle in a warm stable," this annotater wrote in the margin: "That's the trouble--she is one."  And at the top of page 330, someone (Steve?) has written, "I love you, baby -- your husband." Therefore, I'm guessing that at least a husband and wife both read this book.

It's not just inscriptions and margin notes that I appreciate, either. For a good part of my childhood, the covers of Nancy Drew books formed an ever-growing, ever-evolving collage, and my friends and I shared a common goal of collecting all the books. (My best friend succeeded; I never did.) My copies of Forever ... and If There Be Thorns (the forbidden and therefore triply enticing reads from my high-school days) have keyhole covers. My copy of Booth Tarkington's Young Mrs. Greeley was published in Leipzig in 1929, and was stamped "Brentano's Paris" at some point in its life. I have no idea how it found its way to the Philadelphia used bookstore where I bought it for $2.50, but I have fun imagining.

We don't have any of those experiences with a download, and we don't have the physical pleasure of books either: their colors and scents and textures. I suspect that if the paper book survives, it will survive not because of nostalgia (which ebbs with each generation, because new generations have new things about which to be nostalgic), but because some books still do have value as objects apart from the stories contained within their pages. The stories themselves are infinitely downloadable and transmissible (and none the less valuable for that), but we who read them are social and physical beings.