It’s Not Just Me! Or On Books vs. eBooks

I have a long-established love-hate relationship with e-books… On one hand, I love them – I can carry thousands of books around with me in something smaller and lighter than my wallet. And if those thousands of books aren’t enough or what I feel like, I can find nearly any (or at least anyt relatively new and/or relatively popular) book I want and get that in seconds. That’s amazing and fantastic and makes traveling/schlepping kids/waiting rooms/lines infinitely easier and more pleasant.

On the other hand, BOOKS. And by books I mean real, honest-to-god, paper-bound-into-covers books. There’s just something about a *real* book – the feel, the smell, the heft (I like long, involved stories best)… That something isn’t really explainable – either you are a certain kind of reader and get it, or you don’t. (That’s not meant to be as much of a snob-girl statement as it sounds, honest…) I’ve struggled to explain it to people, and pretty much given up as a result of that realization.

Until Now.

Now I have genuine, certified Published Authors (and very different ones at that) who have explained it, in a way I never could. I stumbled upon these several quotes quite coincidentally while reading lately – after finding the third one, I felt like the universe was trying to tell me it was time to pass the thoughts/words on, so here you go…

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath resistant, solar operated, fell good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.
from Neil Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats

“A blank [NB: an alternate universe version of an e-reader] can’t be the same, sir.”
“No,” Wolfe said. ” A blank is a poor, pale imitation, though the words are arranged in precisely the same order; it is the difference between an idea and a physical thing.”
from Rachel Caine’s Ink and Bone

Jess missed handling originals. He’d grown so addicted to the feel of those books – the individual differences in the bindings, the leather or fabric covers, the weight of the papers, the smell. They were a very different experience than these Blanks, which all felt so…sterile somehow. Words that could be readily dismissed and replaced didn’t have the same moral heft to them, to him…”
from Rachel Caine’s Paper and Fire