Print Books: Should They Stay or Should They Go?

I was reading this blog post over at the New York Times about print books and what the future holds for them – and it got me thinking.

You see, I love books. That’s probably obvious by now. I love books. I love digital media. I have an iPad. But I can’t get on with ebooks. I just can’t. I promote them as part of my job, and I think they’re a fantastic tool for education. They make research so much easier. They elimate the need to have multiple copies. They mean there’s no more need for reservations and queues for a popular title. It’s easy to bookmark, make notes, print, copy text. They’re just easier, all round. You can have thousands of books at the touch of a button. You don’t need to store them, display them, pack them up, ship them around. Your entire library, all there, one small simple easy package. I can see the value, the benefit, I can.

But would I read an ebook for fun? No, I’d read the print book.

Books are more than just words on a page. Perhaps it’s part of this disposable society that we live in, where information has to be immediate to be relevant, where all that matters is here and now. I can see the value of ebooks when information is all that you seek, but reading for fun, for pleasure? No, ebooks don’t cut it. Because a book is more than words on a page. A book is an artifact in itself; a book has value beyond the print inside it, beyond the words and the meaning and the lanaguage. I love the way it feels in my hands, the smell of the fresh clean pages, the flex and the give. I love the colour on my bookshelves, the different sizes and shapes, the bent battered spines of my favourite reads, the clean unmarked spines of those books I have yet to read.

I love my books. I love them beyond the stories they contain, the lives and the history and the beauty. I love my books, because they’re a part of me, a part of my home. When I moved into my new flat, it didn’t feel like home until my books were there. And when I visit people the first thing I look at are their bookshelves. A person’s choice of books says so much about them as a person, about their likes and interests and tastes. I can’t get that from a Kindle, a Nook, an iPad. I can’t pick a Kindle off a shelf and exclaim, ‘oh, I love this book’, and have an instant immediate bond with a complete stranger.

Oh, it would be a sad world if ebooks replaced print. A sad sad world, and I’d be one of the last holdouts, scouring antique stores for another copy of Jane Eyre, hoarding copies of Cold Mountain and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Gone with the Wind.

 

Awww. And oh no!

A student brought me a box of chocolates today as a thank you for helping him with his essays and research over this past year. I was really touched, but at the same time…I’m on a diet! I didn’t have the heart to tell him.

Anyone want a chocolate?

I have my iPad…

It is a thing of beauty. You got to hand it to Apple, whatever else they may be, they know how to nail the design. I just want to sit here and stroke it.

I keep waiting for the guilt to kick in about how much it cost, or the regret that I didn’t wait to see what the Asus Eee Pad Transformer was like – but it hasn’t happened yet. I just sit here stroking my iPad. I could be an evil genius with this thing, stroking it in place of a fluffy white cat.

Why the British Library is better than Amazon…

I requested a book via inter-library loan yesterday morning – it arrived in this morning’s post. By contrast, a book I ordered from Amazon several days ago has yet to arrive.

I do love the British Library.

I miss learning…

That sounds weird, I guess. I miss being a student, not because of the life, but because of the learning. I know you never stop learning, but I’m really hankering to go back to university and do another degree. Yeah, I know. Another. I’ve already got two and I don’t need another degree, but I want to, just for myself.

I’d love to do a medieval history MA. I’ve been checking out universities near me and the Open University, but none of them do anything that quite fits what I’m looking for. I want to a medieval history degree. I’d love to do my thesis on Simon de Montfort and the Second Barons’ War, on Lewes and Evesham. Damn, I’m such a geek.