An admitted Luddite perspective on books:
Paper books are inexpensive. They are extra inexpensive used. They retain full functionality used. You can drop them in the bath and a night on the radiator will solve that. You can get food, suncream, sand, all sorts of shit on them and they remain completely functional. They are light and easily transported. They remain functional when scratched, drawn on, chewed lightly by pet. No one will mug you for a book. Their content can not be altered, “cancelled”, or “withdrawn due to sensitivity concerns”. They are completely DRM free. Once you own a book, you own it for life. You can lend the book easily and for free to as many people as you like, and no one can do shit about it. You can resell or give them away easily. You can put them in the post with minimal concerns about theft or damage. You do not need a EULA to operate a paper book. If you are no better than an animal, you can annotate the text easily. You can buy them used. In fact, many people like them better used. (It’s the smell.) They make a thoughtful gift that people will often keep for decades. They will never be subjected to planned obsolescence. They are a form of knowledge that can never be memory holed or taken from you except by physical seizure of your assets. In a time when many creative works are reedited or simply disappeared due to cultural fluctuations, paper books are a mass market, readily available backstop against that remaking of culture and history.
There is a reason why cultural revolutions burn books, and why the well read are first against the wall. Knowledge is power, whatever knowledge it is. A corporation half a world away from you can remotely burn all your ebooks as and when it wants to. Orwell’s Bureau no longer has to manually doctor past publications that say the “wrong thing”: that too is done remotely without your prior knowledge and consent.
Buy books. We really will miss them if ever they are gone.
www.nytimes.com
