Fantastic Metropolis

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Mary Doria Russell

From me, you’ll get a purely practical response: I find that it’s much easier for me to remember where in a book I found something—the physical geography of a page and its position near the front or back or middle is important. I suppose in electronic books, I could just open a Find window and scan for key words, though. The other thing is, you can’t go to bed with a computer. Yet. Once that happens, all bets are off…

Lucius Shepard

Necessary? Of course not. Not even people are necessary. Desirable? Of course. Real books are much easier to rest ashtrays on than on e-books.

Delia Sherman

Well, it’s necessary for me. I find it very difficult to read long things on a screen, and I like to play with the edges of the pages as I read, and maybe flip back (or forward) to re-read (or skip ahead to) another scene. This last is possible with electronic books, I know, but there’s something about the riffle of pages that I find very satisfying. There is also, of course, the question of books as art. I love late 19th century novels with embossed covers and Tom Thumb books that have little, itty printing, and facsimiles of things like the Kelmscott Chaucer and the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. I don’t have a lot of Beautiful Books, but I’d hate for them to disappear from the world.

Mike Simanoff

Books will be around as long as we want to read them. Most people find it uncomfortable to read on a computer screen with the same attention and intensity as they read a printed book. However, we’re humans, and we’re adaptable. The technology will cross the threshold of human toleration and a new generation will grow up comfortably reading something that does not closely resemble our bound pages of ink on paper. Some people will lament this. The immortals on their thrones will sigh for our historical amnesia.

Brian Stableford

Absolutely. If they ever invent an electronic “bookplate” with the same vision definition as a page of print, the battery will always go flat before you get to the end of the story—and once the batteries go out of production your collection of bookchips will be just as useful as your old 78rpm records.

Peter Straub

The bound, printed book is a form perfectly suited to its function. It will fade out if and when the central nature of “books” themselves changes.

Anna Tambour

There are the obvious reasons. No intrusion by technology into the relationship between the information in the book, its presentation, and the reader. Then there are all the more important reasons. The silly ones that fall into the same category as the answer to the question: If you could ingest all your necessary liquid and solid sustenance, calories, vitamins, and minerals by swallowing one pill and a glass of water a day, what is the necessity for eating and drinking anything else? I don’t know about really up-to-date technology, though, not even having a mobile phone. So perhaps others can say better. What is a finer feeling: Turning a page out under the trees, swatting at occasional flies in a flower-smelling breeze, or whatever you do with those electronic readers?

Jeffrey Thomas

To remain in touch with the greatest invention of humankind. We could no more replace physical books with electronic books than we could replace the Acropolis with a computer-generated image.

Scott Thomas

Absolutely. Books ground us. Whereas electronic media has an amorphous quality, books have a sense of permanence; keep us on history’s track where a writer’s words are more than fleeting pixels. Books are a beautiful tradition.