EBooks are the Book's Hero

I've written in depth on this topic before in a rather long academic discourse and came to the same conclusion, but I found an article that was even better.

You see? Better than me. It does, indeed, happen.

*cough*

In the past three or four years, eBooks have been the grim reaper of the publishing and printing industry, at least to publishers and printers. Innovative champions of the future embraced the slim eRearders an their digital contents, while more traditionally minded bookworms blinked in owlish surprise, wondering where all the pages went and that fantastic smell that old (or brand new) binding and pages smell.

Isn't it funny? Old, old books, old enough that their thin, crackly pages are yellow, and new, crisp new books smell so good. Diametrically opposite, and yet they both have a quality to them that is simply irresistible. I think it's not only the paper, it's the binding cloth, or the glue. There's particularly something about books published in the 60s...

And yes, eBooks have gone on the rise. Amazon is selling 114 eBooks for every 100 physical books it sells, and that's just a singular indication of the eBook world. I guarantee, if you haven't purchased or downloaded an eBook for yourself for scholarly purposes, you know someone who has, and you know people who have an eReader of some kind. My parents, for example, have a Kindle Fire or whatever it's called, as does my older sister.

Oh...oh dear! It's spreading!!

But eBooks and eReaders are not the end of the literary world as we know it. If nothing else, it's encouraging growth. EBooks are the fertilizer of the book garden. Because as more people are able to access a greater array of books at their digital fingertips, they're also being introduced to a wide spread of new books that they'll want on their shelf, that can't be purchased as an eBook, or that they never would have had the opportunity to read before without an eReader and now it's on their radar. It's free advertising and it's working.

Andrew Losowsky has great insight on this topic in his article Why Ebooks Are Inspiring A New Age of Print.  Because despite the convenience and innovation of eBooks, they just aren't as solid and substantial as our favorite books. The books with the creases down the spine because we've read them so much, the ones with the slightly rippled pages where you gripped the paper so tightly it dented, the one with the signature on the inside when you, miraculously, got to meet the writer. The one that smells like childhood, like springtime, like winter, like a storm, like love.

Poetic, I know, but admit it-- it's true.

Losowsky describes this phenomenon as being caused by the pure physicality of books: "Enduring physical presence is no small thing in an age when information appears on a screen, then changes, evolves, and maybe even disappears. And as efficient as ebook retailers are, clicking to purchase is a fairly soulless affair in comparison to the pleasures of browsing in a bookstore."

Oh. How true. I once got a shopping spree at Books A Million for a birthday present. I could barely carry all the books out and they made a stack nearly as tall as my dresser next to my bed. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. A must repeat, one of these years...

Losowsky goes so far as to even claim that "ebooks have actually encouraged a new level of fetishization of the printed page." Well. When you put it that way...but really, think about it. You smelled the book's pages before, but did you ever really talk to anyone about it? Now, when you're having a heated debate about the pros or cons of printed versus digital, the feel, the smell-- they become passionate experiences in your arsenal of why you want your physical book. All these sensory components have elevated the physical book, and eBooks were the springboard.

"This might be a generational anomaly, created by those with nostalgia for print and libraries, soon to disappear once the digital natives are in charge. Or this might be the moment where print, freed from its need to do everything, becomes even better at doing what it can do uniquely."

Oh yes-- I think, and indeed hope, that this is the case. Literature is an art form, though you wouldn't know it sometimes by looking at the terrible romance novels (natural or supernatural...) for a penny in the airport waiting lounge. But it is. The words of London, Tolkien, Lewis, of Rilke and Yates...pure art distilled in vocabulary and sentences. Let's get back to it.

I'm going to go smell my favorite book now.