E-books are not books

As I have read my last 10 books on my e-reader (and not on “good old fashioned books”), I believe that it’s a good moment to look around and try to understand a little bit better what is all this going to do to my (maybe “our”) life. When I started reading books most of them were around in my parents library or the library of close friends.

As I have grown up I read more and more books that were not in my parents library, so in a way (slowly) I started to pile up books to build my own library. I think one of the first books I have actually bought (with my own money) for my own library was “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak. Of course I had other books I personally owned, but most of them were received as presents (or from other people in various situations). “Doctor Zhivago” was the first book that I actually bought with the idea of having my own library.

Over time, especially during my first years of studying philosophy, my library has become bigger and maybe as I reached the moment of having around 100 books, I could have said that I had a library that was mine. For all of my life, having books & reading them was (and still is) something precious and I would say, representative for who I think I am.

Looking at things from this perspective, I realised that switching to an e-reader (lately I bought a second one – so this is a serious thing -) will do more to my life than I initially expected. The initial idea was that, as I move around from one place to another (ie. in the last 6 years I switched 4 cities : Bucharest, Timisoara, Utrecht, Haarlem) it will be difficult for me to move my books around and as s such keeping them as e-books would be the perfect solution (ie. no compromise at all) : I could have all my books and at the same time I would not be overburdened by moving them around in big and heavy boxes.I will summarize below the things I believe are so closely enmeshed with the physical nature of the book as to get lost in the switch to e-books.

Borrowing books

When a book is borrowed, one person “looses” it and the other one “has” it. The trivial reason behind this is that a book is a physical object, and as such it cannot be used by two people at the same time.The effect of this is that the gesture of borrowing (not from a library, but from an acquaintance/friend) has it’s own “rules of engagement” :

• there has to be a rather close relationship between the two people involved
• people make (implicit/explicit) promises that they will return the book
• they return the book and if the book is in a good shape then they took good care of it (and as such it can be a sign of good character)

This type of engagement between two people refines and extends other social relationships and acts as social markers by which we are included/excluded from different “borrowing circles”.

Storing the books & having a bookcase

Any owner of more than 200 books knows, the bookcase has to be maintained (dusting the books every 2-3 months) and kept in certain conditions of humidity and temperature.The size & shape of the books obliges the owner to put them in different positions in the bookcase (ie. big volumes stay separate from small ones, collections of the same shape tend to share the same shelves, etc.).As the number of books gets bigger and bigger, the owner has to spread his library across his entire house (anyone with more than 500 or 1000 books knows this) and as such we have the specific interior design of the “bookish people” houses:

• the physical characteristics of the books make them spread & mingle with all the artifacts from our house
• the books are invasive and sometimes can dominate the rest of the objects in the house
• the books are a public display of a person character and tastes & as sch invite or restrain (in a subtle way) the type of conversation you could have with the owner of the library

The bookcase as the “heart” of the public space in the house

A personal library can play (and often does) the role of the fireplace as it marks the “heart” of the house. People often see the library space as the center of the public activities of the family/household ( compare it with the bedroom, which is at the heart of the private – sleep, intimacy, etc.) As the “heart” of the household it can focus the atmosphere of the house & by making all the book-related activities extremely public it adds a dimension of “glorification” to all of them :

• every time when an adult takes a book, the children know that they have to keep quiet and also know that the adult is doing “an important thing”
• as people know what positions are occupied by which books, the books that are currently read are quite public (ie. in one glance I can tell that someone reads Plato, because I see a “hole” in my Plato collection)
• any new additions to the library are easily noticed and invite discussion and explanations

When I think about this I cannot stop remembering other things we lost as part of the change of going digital.

Photo albums & boxes

Going digital in the last decade made the paper photo album something that most of the people have thrown away. Now we have things like : google, flickr & the rest to keep our family photos. In 50 years when your grandchildren will go through your things, they won’t find any photos.

Music

50 years ago people collected vinyl discs and later tapes. Some had large collections that change the way they arranged their houses & were seen as a public display of the character of the owner of the house. In 50 years, when you enter someones home, there will be no way to see what kind of music that person enjoys.

E-books are not books

I believe that as a whole, going digital with books. photos & music (and as such, loosing them as artifacts) we loose them as our “public servants”. Those artifacts were visible only to the people that we trust (were close enough) to invite them to our house : acquaintances, close friends, family. The artifacts of books, photos & music were telling people around us (the ones we trusted enough to invite home) who we were & who we struggled to become. As such they were mediating things in our relations with others and with ourselves (ie. my identity takes over my place in a public way, through the artifacts that dominate the whole house).As we are going digital we are trying to give our “digital artifacts” the role of “public servants” through the use of social networks. But there there is no embodiment and our relation with our digital self (and our digital things) is weak at best.

I think that having e-books & e-book readers if fantastic (just think of the effects it will have on our public libraries in 25 years), it’s important to understand what books do and what e-books don’t. And as such, understand this shift (and choice) in a critical way, with pro’s and con’s.