In All Reality

I spend the vast majority of my time each day staring at a screen. At work, I labor over projects, read emails, check proposal documents, and tinker in Photoshop. Home is no different: I play games, watch movies, write these articles, wander through Twitter, and catch up on the news. I spend every moment that I am learning, creating, and gathering information connected digitally in some way, except for one very important aspect of my existence: my love of reading.

I’m the happy owner of a modest library of books that span the gamut from sci-fi fantasy to reference tomes to game manuals to religious works. They aren’t categorized in any form other than an arbitrary one that makes sense to me. Some of them I haven’t read in years, and may never read again; some I haven’t read at all. Yet, their sheer weight of presence in my home is inspiring – the collected thoughts of hundreds of writers, teachers, philosophers, and artists. They take up a lot of space, in the form of three large bookcases dedicated mostly to their storage and display. Some are aged, their pages stained or torn, their bindings coming apart. They can’t be searched or have their content manipulated. They simply exist as a package, a small capsule of knowledge or collection of stories.

I was listening recently to NPR on my morning drive to work, when a story came on about a business that produces specialized printing stations designed for book publication. The printers themselves, while no small technological feat, weren’t really what caught my interest in the story. The whole goal of the installation of these modular printers was to give the general public access to the hundreds of thousands of books available in their digital network. In addition, anyone who had their own books or writings in the proper file format could stroll up to one of these devices, upload their data, and have a printed, bound, and fresh copy of their own writings in a matter of minutes.

Think about this a moment: we live in a world where everyone has some form of mobile digital device. E-books can be downloaded to PDAs or cellphones. Audio books exist in every file format known to man and there exists a very small segment of our population that doesn’t have access to some form of media player device, whether it be personal or through some public use. There’s even a little piece of hardware dedicated to electronic reading, produced and sold by the largest online book source and retailer in existence. Why would anyone in their right mind be striving to give people the ability to print books at their leisure when they could just as easily skim one on their iPhones?

When you read, you automatically form an intimate connection with the medium in which you are reading. The more personal the subject matter and the more interesting it is to you, the deeper that connection can become. Yet, because of the nature of our digital tools – the Web, networked services, content providers – the intimacy that we would normally form is inhibited by the very generalized applicability that make those services and devices useful.

Let’s go back to my library with its motley collection of Terry Pratchett novels, Dreamweaver reference guides, and Eyewitness Handbooks. If you were to thumb through the pages of any random book, you’d most likely find bookmarks, creased page corners where I’ve marked my spot, and maybe even scraps of paper of whatever else was handy at the time. My books have become something more than just ink on compressed wood pulp; they’ve become a companion and guide to what they contain within. Each has a personality, defined by weight and paper thickness, type size, texture, smell, and color. While the cover wrappings identify the book, these are the attributes that truly define it – and its contents – in our memories.

There’s something about the printed word that I don’t think will ever go away; not with e-books, not with the iPhone, not with PDFs, not even with the Kindle. Having a book and being able to hold it, to thumb through the pages, smell the ink, hear the crackle of pages, actually have to use a bookmark, is something that no amount of electronic wizardry can replace. I can’t imagine a time when bookstores exist to peddle streams of data, broadcasting wifi copies, and selling disks of Wordsworth. Each book – from novels to encyclopedias – is its own journey, and I think those deserve to take up a little extra space.