Why you should buy paper books
The first thing to note is that it’s not about the smell. Maybe books have a smell. I don’t know. Or the feel of the pages. Pages feel good, I guess. But it’s not so much about that.
But the convenience and modernity and coolness of digital books! Think of how many fit on a small device. I read books on my phone, too. But those can’t replace physical books, and here’s why.
1. Once they’re printed, they stay printed.
No one can change what’s on a book without physically altering a book. That may not be the case with digital books. Later edits — additions or deletions or “clarifications” —can be made without the supposed owners of the book being aware of them. Books being ‘retconned’ to fit an evolving narrative might be conspiracy-theory-esque, the stuff of Nineteen Eighty-Four (where ‘retconning’ is Winston Smith’s actual job), but as long as it’s possible, wouldn’t you want to be sure that it couldn’t happen?
2. You own the book. Not a limited-period subscription to it.
They’re yours. You may lose them or lend them or tear them, but they’re yours. (This goes for CDs and DVDs, too.) It might be convenient to have streaming services, but (as many people have found with Netflix), you can’t guarantee that the show you watched today will be available next month. With a paper book, you are not at the mercy of a company controlling or ending your access to it. Think that doesn’t happen? It’s happened already. In 2019, Microsoft (not a tiny company by any means) shut down its ebook store, paying its users back for the books they’d ‘bought’, but discontinuing any access to the books.
Digital rights management (DRM) is the new planned obsolescence, a way to tie consumers to products and companies in a way that insidiously reduces the rights buyers have over what they buy, or think they’re buying.
DRM, in case it wasn’t obvious, is not that great: https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-ebook-apocalypse-drm/
3. Alexa won’t know what page you’re rereading, and that’s a GOOD thing.
Books are ‘smart’ on their own merits, and not because software makes them smart. They’re not connected to the Internet of Things. *Puts on tinfoil hat* Alexa doesn’t know what you’re reading or highlighting. No one does. No big data anything is analyzing your preferences or reading habits and subtly pushing “related content” to you. You are free to re-read that page thirty times and no one will judge you. *Takes off tinfoil hat*
4. You don’t have to charge them. They don’t break if you drop them or drop water on them.
Worth a mention.
5. They look good in your house.
So I’ve heard. Through two years of a pandemic, many people posed in front of very, very pretty bookshelves. Mine are a mess, but I’ve heard that other people own good-looking books. If you’re the kind of person who organizes books by colour, the rest of the points probably aren’t for you.
6. They’re a tiny piece of history.
You can pass them on to your grand-kids. You can write a message in them and it will stay written. The particular cover, type, binding, publisher or illustration is a tiny snapshot of history and production at that point of time.
You can add more. The rhapsodies about the smell and feel of reading paper books. The social advantages of reading in public. And never, never, discount the possibility of a meet-cute over a book.