A Case for Books

(Print this out)

A lot of people read e-books now.
It makes a lot of sense.
I don't have any sort of tablet computer, but I have a smart phone and I do everything else on it.
I call and text my friends, I keep my calendar, I check my bank account (read: get depressed), I receive and compose emails, I facebook, I tweet, I play games, I do crossword puzzles. It helps me keep my mandolin in tune, it let's me know what the weather is going to be, it gives me directions. I can buy music and listen to that music on it. I can listen to the radio. I can watch movies. I can study for school. (Can, don't.) I can google things, learn how to play the banjo, listen to a police scanner, find local African cuisine, check the price of cereal, launch birds at pigs, record a song, orient myself in the wild, add, subtract, divide, be fruitful and multiply.

A friend told me recently that my phone has more computing power than all of Mission Control that shot Apollo 13 into space (and subsequently brought it back.)

"Houston, we have a problem."
"Don't worry. There's an app for that."

That wouldn't have won an Academy Award.

This little machine, smaller than my hand, has put almost every machine I own out of commission. I don't know if the alarm on my alarm clock even works anymore. I don't even know why I have an alarm clock.
But I still have a ton of books.
I tried to read an e-book version of Chekhov's The Three Sisters one time. I couldn't get past the first act. I don't blame Chekhov.
It seems impersonal to me.
I can't read the work of one of the greatest artists in history on a device that shares so much in common with my toaster oven.
What seems personal to me, though is words printed on actual paper. There's no electricity involved. If something strikes me as unique, or fun, or beautiful, I can underline it, circle it, draw a smiley face next to it with my pencil. If I'm reading one book, and I'm reminded of something in another book I can lay them open right next to each other. Inevitably this reminds me of something in another book so I grab that one, then I grab another, and then suddenly I'm laying in my manger wrapped in swaddling books. It's like getting a hug from Joseph Heller, James Joyce, O. Henry, Henrik Ibsen and the Williams Shakespeare and Faulkner.
These books, stitched or glued into cardboard, feel like living things. They each have a soul, so they each need their own body.
Remember Being John Malkovich? All those old people want to move in to John Malkovich's brain, like they've done with so many people before. They can each be John Malkovich, one at a time, for as long as he lives. That's how they gain eternal life.
This is what e-books feel like to me. E-books certainly have merit. Books are, after all, made of paper and glue. They are vulnerable to all the elements. We've all experienced the funeral-for-a-friend feeling of leaving a book in the rain or dropping one in the pool. E-books can be saved in the great unknown that is the Internet, and can float around in space until the end of time. In one million years, an alien retiree with a Data-Detector 9000 will be walking along the banks of an ocean on Mars and dig a Harry Potter book out of the sand. E-books make sure that the hard work of the literary sector of the human race will remain forever.
That still doesn't make me want to read them.
In the late 1920s the Library of Congress started transcribing great works of literature onto microfilms, and people certainly weren't camping out in front of Best Buy to get a new microfilm reader the day after Thanksgiving 1930. (Of course, the economy wasn't stellar that year either.)

Books use a lot of paper, they are products of cut-down trees. It takes a lot of power to run the presses that print them. Many books go unsold, unread, unappreciated for their entire lifetimes. They weigh down backpacks, they get dog-eared and fall apart. You don't stop reading to eat, and then you spill spaghetti sauce all over Billy Pilgrim. But, damn it, I like them.

"I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because they just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside."- Rick Bragg

I love the rough feel of the paper between my fingers, the musky smell when you open a book that hasn't breathed in a few years, the fingerprints, notes and doodles left by previous readers, the sound they make when you close them, and the way they look on a shelf.
But when you tell somebody you love them, you don't have to say "because."
I just love them.
That's my case for books.
I love them.




(You read this on the computer, didn't you.)