Fantastic Metropolis

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
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Ian Covell

Because you don’t always have access to a computer, screen, or electricity; because you can flip back quickly to find something you read; because you can put a bookmark where you stopped reading; because you can read sideways in bed; because a book is a construct of paper and color and meaning and a disk is only a disk.

John Coulthart

Yes, because they’re a perfected technology that don’t even require electricity to be made, never mind used. Maximum delivery of content with a minimum of effort. Electronic technology requires a huge range of exterior factors to work at all, books are immediately useful anywhere, in any condition, including—potentially—underwater or in space. I’ve rescued books from the street that I still use today. Throw a book off a building and you can still use it. Now do the same with a laptop…

Jack Dann

For a number of reasons—firstly, that I believe we lose an important sensory part of reading if we lose physical books; and, second, physical objects have a better chance of being around—we’re already losing electronic information because of obsolete storage technology. (Remember floppy disks?) Books can dry and rot, but I think they give information another chance to survive.

Ellen Datlow

Depends on the book. There are certainly plenty of disposable books that one would read and toss—those could be electronic—why waste paper on them? Books that a reader wants to collect—for now—most collectors want the actual physical artifact in their grubby hands—at least to hold for a few seconds. But a new generation of readers might not feel that way—it’s just a psychological approach. Perhaps in the future “collectors” will be happy to have their favorite e-books collected in files.

Alan DeNiro

I think it’s more necessary because of the very fact of the increasingly electronic world.

Cory Doctorow

No!

L. Timmel Duchamp

Isn’t this obvious? Electronic media are extremely fragile. One good environmental or climatic catastrophe (or a nuclear war) would wipe out just about all of it. The book as a physical object is not only relatively durable, but can also be used without the massive support system [required by] electronic media.

Lawrence Dyer

Yes. Because their physical attributes lend weight (sometimes literally) to their content. There is nothing at all wrong with e-books, though their lack of physicality can make them more transitory in the mind. Sometimes they have no physical location or presence to be returned to months or years down the line. E-publishing is just another medium to take a book to a reader, yet physical books are definitely enhanced by their physical presence in the real world, and very strongly enhanced too.

Brian Evenson

Yes, I think it is. There’s a different reading experience associated with books, and I think it’s an experience that computers cannot provide. I find myself, when I try to read on-line or read an electronic book unable to pay attention, easily exhausted. Words as light don’t have nearly the appeal as actual print on page.

Tim Feeney

The old print/electronic dichotomy…I don’t think that physical paper-and-ink books will disappear in my lifetime. As Mary Caponegro has pointed out, one problem is that many folks tend to think in terms of books versus electronic media, when in reality they’re totally separate forms, each with different functions and appeal. Pitting them against each other is like pitting music against sculpture or something: I guess you can do it, but the two modes are so different that there might be no point. Maybe books will cease to be of use to the generations who truly grow up reading from screens, but unless paper costs go through several atmospheric layers, I doubt it; there’s still too much benefit to be had from thin sheets of fixed text—a book is literally and metaphorically flexible in a way that electronic media currently aren’t; it’s tangible media, which gives it an immediacy and intimacy lacking in e-media, something I suspect is a paper book’s most basic appeal.

Karen Joy Fowler

I expect that books are not ecological and will eventually be treated accordingly. But I do love them. I do a fair amount of research, and the library with its books shelved next to books of similar topic is so much more fruitful than the Internet. And the whole experience is less wearying even though you do actually have to stand and walk a bit. Plus I’d like to point out that libraries have become one of the few quiet public spaces remaining. The television screen has now become a fixture in many stores, restaurants, is inescapable at the airport. On the plane you’re always asked to pull the shade on your window so that others can enjoy the movie, even though the overhead light rarely hits your book properly. We’re seeing a steady encroachment on the places where you once could go and read.