I love technology. You might doubt me, thinking I'm one of those stuffy old people who lectures others about looking at screens all day. Hah! No siree! I'm just a weird person who gets excited by all the newest gadgets and technological advances. We're living in an incredible time! I'm living smack-dab in the middle of history! I remember when there was no internet available to regular people (non-government entities). Scary, right? Honestly I don't even know what life would have been like without internet. Probably a little better in some ways, and a lot worse in other ways.
So, if I love technology so much and digital is obviously the most eco-friendly and space-saving option, why would I want there to always be physical books available?
A dilemma, to be sure. Most of my reasons are about the experience of reading a book. The smell of a new book, the weight of it in your hands. It never runs out of battery and needs to be charged in the middle of a reading spree. The covers are eye-catching and hard to miss in my normal clutter, but another electronic blends in. It doesn't call to me in the same way a beautiful book does.
It's just as easy to set an e-reader or tablet down, as it is to set a book down when you need to do something before getting back to reading. There's usually a bookmark feature to use as well that will mark your reading spot...just in case the thing you need to do takes longer than expected and depletes the e-reader battery.
Books can be easily loaned to friends and family, though I'm very selective with who gets to borrow my books. I'm not a library, after all. This was my own money saved up for a special book. I'm the person that puts my name in the book, because I don't want any confusion about whose copy somebody has. You might want to borrow my e-reader but I'm even more stingy with that. If you don't live with me, I'm not letting you borrow it. Not only did it cost a lot more money than just one book, but it likely has my entire reading library on it. When you take that, I no longer have access to many (perhaps, most) of my books. That just sucks.
Luckily, I still have overflowing bookcases. Sometimes this makes me frustrated at the lack of space or how I tend to pile other stuff on bookcases, making them look like mini-chaos displays. I love my e-reader, but at the same time even when using a better memory card there's issues with what the system allows you to move to the memory card and how the device reads memory (internal memory first, then external memory). Sometimes devices are finicky and you end up having to continually shuffle programs and books back and forth between internal memory and the memory card. Pain in the butt.
If I have too many physical books, worst-case scenario I just start stacking them into cool piles as I get them and make a nifty design in my house or something. Who doesn't want book-columns in their house, am I right?
I also like to think long-term. Technology as we know it is evolving quickly. DVDs are practically a thing of the past with Blu-Ray taking their place. Though cassettes were available widely still in the 1990's, we went to CD. Eventually, modern electronics won't be able to play old mediums. This means that in much the same way that our portable radios (not mp3 players, just regular radios) don't play records, 8-tracks and sometimes not even cassettes, future technology may not even be able to read our current digital book collection. Technology might develop a much more efficient storage type for books that is the new standard, making our current technology obsolete like an 8-track. As long as the human race keeps learning how to read, we'll be able to read the physical books just fine, even if we can't access what might eventually be called "ancient" digital book files. Also, let's be real, that e-reader will have quit anyway. That effectively forces you to buy another device on which to peruse your book collection, or you just don't get to access your books or worse...you can only read them sitting at your computer.
I love my computer just as much as the next person, possibly more, but I hate reading books on it. I can't take it with me and curl up nice and comfy, even if it's a laptop cuz I need somewhere to put the laptop so I can see it. There's a lot more prepping to find a place and get comfy with a laptop than there is with just grabbing a favorite book and curling up. If you drop a book it'll make an embarrassingly loud sound depending on how big the book is, but it still works just fine. You drop a tablet the right way and you've got a cracked screen, or something that no longer powers on.
If I truly want people to be able to access the same stories and books that we have access to now, the best way to do it is to have both physical and digital copies of the books. Also, what if there is a zombie apocalypse and you end up without being able to use much technology at all? I'd want to be able to access regular books to hopefully learn enough to make a cure, or at least to help myself and others survive. Books are packed full of knowledge, and if you have enough time, you can train yourself in a lot of subjects. So, there's also the issue of making sure you have resources in a zombie apocalypse.
The basics:
Physical books are convenient
Easy to lend to friends and family
Have eye-catching art on the covers
Can be easily personalized with a name written inside
Cost less to replace than e-readers
Is in a format everyone can access and understand (assuming they know how to read)
Those are the basics of why I think physical books should always exist. I like holding a book. Each one is different. Some have slightly textured covers, rough-edged pages, or that new-book smell. All of those sensations become memory points as you're reading and experiencing it again helps you remember the first time you read the book. That's why it's like revisiting an old friend. I'm down with that.
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