I remember in high school that a teacher of mine had a discussion with my whole year level about the rising popularity with e-books and the decline of traditional, physical books. Apparently, people fear that books will soon die and fade into history, becoming a relic of the past like the ink and quill.
Well, here’s what I think. I don’t think that books will die very soon, in fact, it may take generations for it to cease to exist. As long as people start reading books at a young age and grew up with it, it will stay in our lives. As long as there are a majority of people who prefer to read books (like me) than reading e-books exist, it will stay. When the trend for books start going down, it will be gone because that’s how businesses work. Who can make a profit from a product that is declining in use?
There are however, other factors that prompt us to reject the very idea of its elimination such as how some people like having a collection of books or how nice it feels to close a book when you’ve finished reading it and other small satisfactions like that but I think that the most critical aspect to it is that books have historical significance in relation to writing. It’s been a part of human lives for centuries and it’s very hard to accept getting rid of something that has been with us for a very long time. In fact, it would feel unnatural if it’s gone. I believe that the reason for this is because of writing. When I think of writing, I think of paper and pencil and books are a result of a stack of written paper. Additionally, writing is and always will be an essential skill to have and it goes hand in hand with reading which is also another important skill to have.
On a side note, I sometimes find it very weird when I type “write” instead of “type” when I’m typing out an article.
Personally, I believe that books will continue to stay. It has that particular experience that’s totally different than reading an e-book. Also I’d like to comment that, I find it easier to read the readings when I print them out instead of reading them electronically. For some reason, my eyes hate seeing scanned texts on-screen.
[…] Kimberely believes books will stay, and they will, but as scholars notice how in this post book already means literature. Books though don’t mean literature, and literature happens outside of books (drama, spoken poetry, electronic literature, literary games), and the novel is not all of literature. So, in many ways, when people argue that books are forever they actually mean the novel. And the problem with that is that a novel seems to work perfectly well not on paper. James makes a similar point. What is interesting is how we know that a novel is not about the paper, it is about what happens on it. That is why they can be translated into films, plays, retold verbally to someone else (“oh, that novel’s about….”) Yet in the late age of print with an anxiety of relevance (no one needed to defend the book in this way 50 years ago, it is similar to the way, say, film makers insisted on the special aesthetic qualities of film before they went and bought their first red camera and realised they were aestheticising the wrong thing), yet now we are going to think that the essence of why that book is valuable is not what is on the pages, but the phenomenal experience of the thing. That is rubbish. Push the argument. That book over there is now my most special book because its pages feel and smell the nicest? Novels matter because of the words, not the paper. Written by adrianmiles Posted in commentary Tagged with Douglas, hypertext, weavings […]