Fantastic Metropolis

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
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Neil Gaiman

Because they don’t die when you drop them. Also they are solar powered.

Stephen Gallagher

They’re self-contained. Imagine crawling out of a hole the morning after the apocalypse. You have all the knowledge you need to reconstruct civilization from the ground up. And it’s on a CD-ROM.

Theodora Goss

Yes. Computers, when balanced on one’s knees, tend to fall into the bathwater.

M. John Harrison

Reading off a screen is less comfortable. I’m sure someone will come up with something else.

Rhys Hughes

Not necessary at all, but absolutely desirable. A private library should resemble a forest, perhaps the forest from which the books were originally made, with new growth replacing the old, with decay and vigor, rot and health in random positions throughout the collection. A physical process. But even if this analogue is utterly wrong and books should be considered as dead objects, they must remain large and real and thus physical, because any collection greater than one volume has more in common with architecture than technology, and may not be miniaturized correctly. A telephone can be made more effective and useful with a reduction in size, but not a cathedral or stadium. A book is not a dynamo or laser. Not strictly.

Shelley Jackson

Necessary, no. Except that it is probably necessary that there be unnecessary objects, to prove that there is always more of the world than just enough.

Harvey Jacobs

I don’t know if non-digital books are “necessary,” but I certainly hope they endure. I find reading stuff under glass much less pleasurable than flipping pages. But I also liked typing on a Royal Portable, so…

Stephen Jones

Because I collect books. I don’t collect electronic files. I like to look, touch, admire, feel, stare, move, open, close, touch my books. I want them to be mine. And I want to show them off to other people…

Henry Kaiser

Yes! They are still the best interface for rapid assimilation of textual info, especially in the field, especially on a tropical beach with nice ambient surf sounds and dolphins waiting to play with you in the lagoon…etc.

James Patrick Kelly

Some books, yes. Most books, no. If there was a literary equivalent of the iPod—and I expect there will be before too long—that featured a paper-like screen, I would happily load my entire library onto it and sell almost all of my books. You see, I work in my library and dust is a constant problem. As is organization; I can never find the book I’m looking for. Also, I have far too many books and no matter how often I cull my collection, it seems to grow ever larger.

Rick Klaw

Yes. In practical terms until the day that the 3 B’s (bath, bus, and beach) can adequately be handled by electronic media, the print book will continue to exist. The bus has been conquered, but water and sand are detrimental to all reading devices.

John Klima

I’ll always buy physical books. I need to be able to look at them all at once, run my fingers along the spine, etc. If I had 300 books on my computer, I wouldn’t get the same thrill from looking at a list of titles. It would feel too much like work. Someone will need to come out with a stable, non-reflective reading surface, mass-market sized reader that’s inexpensive, and markets its books as cartridges that I can plug (so I can line up all the books I own on a shelf) into the main unit before I give up paper books. But that means that I still want books to remain physical objects. But that’s my opinion. In general? I think people are less likely to steal a book or photocopy an entire book than they are willing to copy a file and give it to all their friends. Better, safer encryption will have to exist before physical-object books will disappear.