The end of the book? Say it ain't so!

As we enter the holiday season, busy shoppers frantically enter overcrowded stores with “what in the hell do I get him/her” on the brain. In my family, we try to make things easier for our Kris Kringle/Secret Santa by sending wish lists around to everyone involved in the exchange, items that we would like our secret buyer to get that fall within our price limit. Personally, I prefer to both give and receive more intimate gifts, gifts that demonstrate really knowing a person and tug at the heart strings more than a mall gift card can do.(but that’s a whole other can of worms that needs a post of its own) Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against gift cards—in fact, my wish list almost always includes an Indigo gift card…which inevitably results in the same comment from my brother year after year, finally bringing me to the point of this post.

“Why don’t you just get a Kobo/Kindle? There’s so much easier than buying books”. Then begins the back and forth about the advantages and disadvantages of trading in paperbacks for paperless. To my chagrin, my brother usually counters my good points for material books with equally valid points in favour of technology. Reading off a screen wears on my eyes and gives me headaches. “Kobo has an anti glare screen, so it’s not like reading from a computer”. Digital readers can often be expensive. “But e-books are cheaper, so you’re saving in the long run.” And there’s that ever present argument that going paperless is actually better for the environment. Well it’s hard to compete with that; what am I supposed to say, “F—the trees?” (I mean, who really needs greenery, or oxygen…)

But I maintain that there’s still something to reading an actual book, to holding it in your hand and feeling the pages under your thumb as you flip through the story. And I get this albeit strange sense of pride when I look at how full my bookshelf is with books I’ve read, a Dickens here, a Bronte there (some two or three times) or books I’ve yet to get to: literary adventures just waiting for me to embark upon. Take a look at those beautiful bookshelves we included in an earlier post. The frames may have colour or rustic wood, but the books provide the character: both to the physical shelves in the variety of cover textures and styles, and to the owner, as a testament to the kind of literary pursuits a particular person enjoys. Now imagine those bookshelves with only a Kobo or Kindle for company: pretty sad.

 

VS.

And there are those reader idiosyncrasies that seem lost when there’s not an actual book to handle. For instance, I have this terrible habit of flipping to the last page and reading the last sentence, even if it completely ruins the book’s climactic surprise. I do it every time; maybe it’s my strong aversion towards surprises and the unknown in general. There’s just not that same feeling of rapid sneakiness and the feeling of “I really shouldn’t be doing this but I like to live on the edge” when you’re waiting for a page to load or sliding your finger over the screen to get back to where you were. I also like to see my progress every time I put my book mark back in, to see how much more of the story I’ve accomplished that day. I know that technology will kindly inform me that I am 88% of the way through the book or whatever, but it’s just not the same as feeling the shifting balance of the novel as the pages move from one side to the other. It’s the small things that I would miss should the world decide that paper-less is more. Maybe it’s the devout English major in me, but I believe that there are still advantages to reading books that are not merely words scanned onto a screen. The end of the paperback? I certainly hope not.