Fantastic Metropolis

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
Examples · Memories · Bios

Cheryl Morgan

Yes. e-books would make my life so much easier, but my laptop is inconvenient for reading and gives me eye strain.

Darren Nash

Yes. There is a pleasure in turning the page and seeing your progress through the book that is at once simple and deeply complex (in what it says about us as human beings, and readers).

Richard Eoin Nash

It will only be necessary if the book gives us something more than the text. 99% of books fail to do this. As a publisher I read most submitted manuscripts on my Palm Pilot and it is as, if not more, an immersive experience as reading a trade paperback. In order for print books to be a necessary container, they have to offer either a greater potential for fetish (as would be the case with the above-referenced books) or in the medium-term, functionality. (Compare Douglas Rushkoff’s 8X8 print book with footnotes running down the margins to the layout of the eBook where the footnotes are below the main text.) But right now, print books are relying almost exclusively on the failing of electronic device design (not just screen technology but the general boxiness of most computers’ design) rather than on any inherent quality of the book itself. To take just one example: books are the shape they are because of the exigencies of industrial manufacture. Most people are comfortable reading columns of about 4-5 words (see news papers), but book design in a highly un-ergonomic fashion, insists on width 2-4 times wider than ideal. To add another example: the one-size-fits-all of a book. Millions of Americans are not reading books because of various disabilities either with sight itself or cognitive disorders. It’s more comfortable to read white-on-black and not vice versa. People need larger fonts. Some people read better on a blue background.

Vera Nazarian

Yes, please, books must continue being booklike things of book flesh and book blood in the original sense. Only a physical book can grow decrepit gently and gradually, along with each one of us. Each physical copy is unique—in a weirdly recursive sense, a tangible bookmark of our lives. We can own more than one of the same, and each will have its own identity. What more can be said? A book is a person with rights!

Ian Nichols

For one thing, because they last longer. Even CDs don’t have the lifespan of books. They are also less vulnerable to changes in environment. E-books will be readable until the next change in operating system.

Lance Olsen

I suspect the declarations of the physical book’s death are premature. I also suspect that death is inevitable, even exciting, just not yet. In the end, we’ll all be reading illuminated manuscripts, then we’ll be inhabiting them, then they’ll be inhabiting us.

Milorad Pavić

I always used to write books which it is possible to read in both ways—nonlinear and classic (from the beginning till the end). Of course, I know they have different meanings depending on the way you use the book. I prefer the interactive, nonlinear approach. This means the book is a virgin for every new reader.

Dan Pearlman

We value not only the tactility of the printed book, but the portability, the durability (of paper versus electronic media), the physical independence (of all other technological support systems), and the textual immutability (hacker-proofness). But it’s fortunately never a question of either/or since electronic-text technologies offer their own supplementary advantages that I would not want to sacrifice.

Justina Robson

I like books on shelves—they remind me I haven’t read them, or that I have and I enjoyed them (or not but they don’t stay long). If everything were electronic, I’d have no sense of what I liked or how much I’d read (or how little), and the times I liked it wouldn’t be all laid out as a visual history. So for me it’s important they exist. A picture paints a thousand words and a billion library shelves full of books is a damn sight more awe inspiring and immediate than the alphanumerals “10gb.”

Luís Rodrigues

Not necessary, but there is a stronger sense of possession about the physical object. Besides, you only need a light source and at least one functioning eye in order to enjoy words on a piece of paper.