Feel free to put down your ax now. It turns out there’s no need to chop up your bookshelf for kindling wood.
The highly touted “e-book revolution” isn’t happening just yet. Americans aren’t quite ready to disavow real books — the ones with paper pages, and stiff covers — and replace them with electronic versions read on a computer screen, or on hand-held devices. Real books — the kind you’ve read all your life — have been given a reprieve.
According to a recent news report, electronic books just aren’t selling. Publishers are manufacturing them, but readers aren’t buying them. The idea — putting an entire book on a small disc, or coding a book to be downloaded to a personal computer over phone lines — sounded so forward-looking, so 21st Century. Who wouldn’t want to buy books that can be displayed on a screen?
The world, evidently.
People, the early returns show, like books just the way they are. They’re in no hurry to toss out traditional books as if they were so many long-playing vinyl records, and replace them with the literary equivalent of CDs.
Those in the publishing industry who are still pushing the concept of e-books say it’s just a matter of time until they are proved correct. The electronic devices that display the digitalized books need to be made simpler, they say; the path from electronic publisher to book reader must be made smoother. When that happens, they say, the world will embrace — devour — electronic books.
I think they’re wrong.
I think traditional books — the ones with pages you can turn with your fingers — will be with us forever, and that e-books, except in specialized fields, will never flourish.
Why? Because a book is one of the few perfect products mankind has ever developed.
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Not the contents — the content of each book depends on the skill of the author.
But the book as a form — as a thing — cannot be improved upon.
It’s as portable as portable gets. If one of the purposes of electronic publishing is to come up with a book a person can easily carry anywhere, it’s wasted effort — books already can be carried anywhere.
There’s a sweet little heft to the feeling of a book in your hand — it gives the pleasing illusion of being yours and yours alone. No one resents the size and weight of a book — unless it’s a schoolchild lugging about a dozen of them in a stuffed backpack. A book doesn’t require being made smaller.
As for the lure of reading all your books on the same computer screen, the fallacy is the premise that people look forward to returning to their computer screens again and again.
Perhaps that was the case in the first days of the personal computer spurt — but by now, people are beginning to regard their computer screens as places they long to flee from. We all look at screens all day — at work, at home, increasingly in public places. The last thing we want, in our brief moments of potential pleasure, is to be tethered to a shiny flat screen.
A book has always promised the feeling of a small vacation. Now that is more true than ever — holding a real book in your hands feels private, like a quiet escape: voluntary solitude. It takes you away from the rest of your life. It feels like a one-to-one conversation — between the man or woman who wrote the words, and you.
Put those words on a screen? Like every e-mail and office document and financial spreadsheet you gaze blankly at all day and all evening? The purpose of a book has always been to take you somewhere else. It’s difficult to go somewhere else when you are staring at the same kind of screen you’ve been staring at all week, all month, all year. That defeats the purpose of what books are. Each book in your hand is — or should — be something new and discrete. A book shouldn’t feel like software. A book should feel firm.
So it’s not surprising that the world is rejecting electronic books. In our new era of communications in which a seemingly endless cacophony of voices scream and yammer and shove to get our momentary attention, a book — a book as we have always known it — remains a placid and peaceful island. No need to sink the island and start over. We like the island just the way it is.
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– Bob Greene comments on the news of the day Thursdays on the “WGN News at Nine.”