Fantastic Metropolis

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Forrest Aguirre

Yes. Perhaps it’s the last couple thousand years of human evolution, but reading from the printed page is just plain easier on the eyes than reading from electronic media. There is also a degree of emotional comfort to be derived from the book as object. They remind us that it is healthy to slow down our pacing a bit and enjoy reading, as people used to do. Physical books provide a certain exercise for the brain that is absent when one is hurriedly running through an electronic text trying to save one’s eyes from over straining.

Hawk Alfredson & Mia Hanson

Yes, books need to exist in traditional book form. I don’t feel comfortable with computers. Mia wants to mention that “books are important historical relics of their time. To abolish books would be to abolish not only the art of everything associated with bookmaking, but the silencing of modern culture up to this point in time. The intellect should not be segregated to only the untactile dimensions of hyperspace.”

Neal Asher

Because we like to own things we like. You can’t own data on a screen, and its very impermanence engenders the fear of losing it, and consequently the need for something permanent. This may change, but it shows no sign of doing so yet. There’s the aesthetics as well. We all buy beautiful useless objects to decorate our homes with. How much better to buy beautiful useful objects such as books?

Dale Bailey

Yes. Absolutely yes. They’re the perfect technology—portable, intuitively useful (no instructions required), and they require no power source. And they furnish a room. A house without books doesn’t seem lived in to me.

R. M. Berry

Yes. Even computer images are physical objects. However, there’s a standing question about whether electronic books are books. As it turns out, this is the same question as that of whether or to what extent physical books are books.

K. J. Bishop

I think so. No matter how small and portable computers become, reading texts on screen strains the eyes (well, it strains mine), and even LCD screens aren’t as comfortable as paper. Though for rare and obscure books, having an e-text is a lot better than having no text at all.

Richard Bleiler

Yes. Not everything is digitized. Not everything will be digitized. Not everywhere is wireless accessible. One can do different things with a book (physical object). Not to say that e-texts do not have their uses and places, but it is hard to imagine (say) a collector gloating over his e-texts the way one would gloat over his collection of Arkham House publications. One can throw a book with relative impunity. Not so a computer. One can read a book when the power goes out. (And you city dwellers better believe it does in these rural areas!) A book can be looked upon as a work of art. Art will endure. And so on.

Jonathan Carroll

So we can carry them around and not have to be near an electrical outlet to plug in and read them. There is no greater place in the world to read a book than on a park bench when you have an afternoon to kill.

Jay Caselberg

Yes, I have my treasure cupboard. I cannot carry my treasure cupboard around on my Palm. I do, however, read on my handheld. That’s for portability—the capability to carry around multiple volumes at once. Real world books are for keeping.

Michael Chabon

Duh! Is it necessary for apples to exist as objects in our increasingly artificially flavored world?

Michael Cisco

Yes, because not everyone has access to computers, and because not everyone has asbestos eyes. I hate reading things off screens (but I love crafting long painful-to-read emails for other people). Books are cheap, portable, never run out of power, but more importantly making books is itself an art. I’ve never heard yet any suggestion that paintings on gallery walls be replaced with computer facsimiles hanging on flat screens, or that all music henceforth be created exclusively on computers. Or that all food be cooked on computer screens and eaten by little programs while the user sucks feebly at the keyboard. Our world may be increasingly electronic, but it might become decreasingly electronic in the future; and nowhere is it written that everyone everywhere will eventually have computer access. Scrapping books would be like insisting everyone live underground—expensive and pointless.

Brendan Connell

Absolutely. For me, it is impossible to read more than a page or two in an electronic format. I like to read lying down on the couch, in parks, poised on mountainous crags, in airplanes, cars, and cafes.

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.

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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.

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Kathe Koja

“Necessary?” I don’t know. I grew up loving books, I live in a forest of them, I can’t imagine my life without them. And for sheer convenience, cost, etc., it will be hard to beat a paperback as—what?—an idea delivery system? But my son’s generation seems to prefer to read things on screen. So how necessary it will be to them is maybe the heart of the question.

Jay Lake

Maybe not for our children and grandchildren, but for us, for now, yes. The physiology of reading from a reflective surface (paper) is very different than the physiology of reading from a luminous surface (a screen). If a human learned to read on screen and did the majority of his or her early reading on a screen (not ideas I favor, by the way), then an electronic book is the most natural object for them. For the rest of us, print books are the natural object, e-books an object of convenience. Note that the advent of “smart paper,” already in limited availability, will significantly blur this distinction. In effect, you could own one book, and it would be any book you needed it to be.

David Langford

Yes. Because I don’t like reading long texts on a screen. Or, indeed, lugging a laptop into the bathroom on the occasion of some long, contemplative bowel movement.

Tanith Lee

Naturally. We are three-dimensional physical beings ourselves, and need our kindred close.

Des Lewis

From a personal point of view, I cannot read fiction for long on a screen. Indeed, irrespective of the physical discomfort, the text acts differently, inferiorly, when not on paper. Indeed, the text is different, even if it uses exactly the same words and same font. And not only the text, but the meaning of that text! Also, the text’s provenance is missing when on a screen; and the sense that the text as paper-borne will populate all manner of human habitation and weathering, and be exchanged and live as long as the span of the planet itself, reflects back on the text itself and makes it what it is, changes it into what it truly should have been all along. Provenance is “old-fashioned,” in the true sense of that. Text on screens is here today, gone tomorrow, but okay for fast-changing facts and conversational communication.

Nick Mamatas

Yes. The real world has a better resolution than any screen. Half the people on the planet, including my grandmother who lives atop a little mountain on an island in the Aegean, have never received a telephone call. A bookshelf, or even tastier, a book pile, won’t suddenly shimmer and vanish into the nether realms the way data on hard drives do far too often. The Patriot Act does not apply to the space between page and eye. How many floppy discs from 20 years ago still work? How many books still work? It’s no contest, base matter wins.

Javier A. Martinez

I think so. It is difficult to conceive of a world that is paper-free, especially when it comes to books. Aside from the fact that I read better when there is a page in front of me, I think some of the personal aspect is lost when we read on-line or e-texts. Of course, I’m a product of the print world, so I’m naturally going to gravitate toward printed products. Ask a kid in his teens and you’d probably get a much different answer. One of the strong points of e-texts is hyperlinks. They are an excellent teaching tool and can really deepen your appreciation of the text. I like books, but I imagine it’s only a matter of time until they become an antiquated indulgence for the old farts we’ll one day become.

Farah Mendlesohn

Reading in the bath.

Michael Moorcock

I don’t know about “necessary,” but they are still very portable and useful. They require no batteries or power source and are usually available in quantity, costing relatively little to replace. Storage is a problem. I bought my present house because it has very high ceilings and I could install a library into the largest room, with shelves reaching high above me. Even then, most of those shelves are double stacked. This means that I now have to sell my books with my house or go through the trauma of repacking them and storing them somewhere, since I have no need or desire for a larger house. Would I like most of these books on disk? I think the answer’s yes. Would they give me the same physical pleasure? Of course not. I suspect that the emergence of the book as a work of art, as in the case of Savoy and others, is in response to the availability of electronic reading material. This suggests that the book will continue to be bought, alongside other methods of delivery!

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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.

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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.

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William Thompson

At present, yes. In future, probably not. Should technology ever be concertedly directed towards the development of e-reader technology—an effort recently abandoned or at least put on hold with the advent and popularity of PDAs—with hardware and software developed that will duplicate as closely as possible the present reading experience with traditional books—a hardware interface that replicates the size of a traditional book, is transportable, and offers the resolution quality or better of printed text—I foresee the conversion of traditional printed text to digital, with books being relegated to museum interest and limited, handmade editions for the collecting market. If I were to guess, this conversion to digital format is eventually a foregone conclusion at some point. But first the problems of delivery and resolution need to be resolved, as well as hardware at a price that makes it available to the mass consumer. At present, studies have shown (see Ohio State) that both comprehension and speed of reading from a computer monitor is approximately 25 to 30% less than with printed text. It is believed this is due in large part to a failure on the part of monitor resolution to equal that of physical print. Issues of potential damage to the eyes must also be factored, though it must be acknowledged that monitor alternatives are presently available, if at a price that precludes most of the population, and firms such as Microsoft are working on the text resolution problem… Though I believe conversion to digital format is likely inevitable, this need not necessarily be viewed as negatively. There is ample evidence in the field of research and academia that such conversion would likely lead eventually to increased access, and it has been suggested that such a conversion could lead to a renaissance in the area of illustration, as the current financial limitations imposed with traditional printing would be largely absent in reproduction in digital format. Also, writers and creators have only begun to explore the possibilities offered by storytelling in a multimedia environment, with the potential for presenting narratives in entirely new ways only now beginning to be glimpsed. Nor does conversion of publishing to digital format preclude production in traditional print and binding, but offers new alternatives.

Jeff Topham

Necessary? No. Desirable? Yes. I suppose I’m a Luddite in this respect. I just don’t think I’d derive as much pleasure from curling up in my favorite chair with a handheld reader, and I doubt that scrolling through a list of files would be as much fun as my desultory wandering through the shelves of my library. On the other hand, I enjoy having access to books online and do a good bit of reading via the Internet. I think electronic publishing has its place and certainly opens up intriguing possibilities. I find, however, claims that it will replace conventional publishing as ludicrously exaggerated.

Lisa Tuttle

Yes, they must exist physically! I can’t give a well-thought-out rational reason for this; it’s an emotional issue for me. I love books.

Gordon Van Gelder

Recently, I got a call from someone looking for a 1950s back issue of F&SF, the one with “Baby” by Carol Emshwiller in it. Turns out he was staying at an aunt’s house when he was a kid and found a box of issues in their basement. “And that’s why I don’t ever want the magazine to become an electronic publication,” I said.

Alan Wall

Yes. The last word in Joyce’s Ulysses. The great acclamation: yes. I can show you an extreme example, though a beautiful one, to prove the point. The Anathemata by David Jones. Faber and Faber, 1952. Now this is a case where pursuing the first edition isn’t a sign of unbridled bibliophilia, but straightforward necessity. No other version of the book is laid out so as to convey the decades of work that went into its composition, the astonishing thoughtfulness of its lineation. I forked out £75 for this a decade ago. Money well-spent. I suppose it is possible that words will be designed to fit into their electronic sites as well as words have here been designed to fit into a book, but I haven’t seen such an example yet. Here the book, the physical fact of the book, is the words’ true home. And the illustrations. I’ve suddenly realised how long it is since I took this book down from its shelf. As soon as I’ve finished here, I shall read some of it. I’d forgotten how good it feels in my hand. The book has enticed me, in its old fashioned, silently come-hitherish way. If the book should cease to exist as a physical object in our increasingly electronic world, then I sincerely hope they burn me along with the last copy, on the same bonfire, though I suspect I know well enough which one of us will be the turtle, which the phoenix emerging from the flames.

Michael Walsh

There is something about the concept of the physicality of the book that I love. I love the electronic world, but I do like nice paper!

Liz Williams

I have a problem curling up in bed with the computer. But it would be good for forests, for sure.

Neil Williamson

Yes. Because I (and I’m told others agree) am unable to read quantities of text off a screen. It’s the standard answer but it’s true. It hurts the eyes, it isn’t convenient to sit in the same place and read for hours—I can’t take my PC on the underground or to the gym—and even if I print out the text, the result comes nowhere near to approximating the physical relationship one has with reading a book.

Richard Winters

I sure hope so. But I think they will exist in the way handmade pottery and other implements still exist—as fine items for the aficionado. Otherwise they will be electronic, or else cheap throwaway items you can buy in the airport or market and read on the plane or the bus. At that point it doesn’t really matter if it’s electronic or not.

Paul Witcover

See my answer about cats. Other things are worth hitting with books as well, such as bugs, mice, dogs, and, occasionally, guests. Of course, other objects are also useful for this purpose. But books, since they come in so many different sizes and weights, are ideal, as the precisely desired amount of damage can be inflicted—assuming one’s library is sufficiently stocked!

Gene Wolfe

I wish I could say that physical books are necessary, but I sincerely doubt it. Nice, beyond question. But necessary? My wife has a reading machine. You put the book under it and read the screen, on which you can adjust the type size. She reads a lot, and just about everything she reads is read on that screen.

Tamar Yellin

I’ll probably only be repeating what others have said, but the book as cultural object is so freighted with history and association that its disappearance would leave a great void in our sense of ourselves as humans, as inheritors of civilizations. You might say that our grandchildren need not feel that way, but that will only be the case if we make it so. And the book is not, nor need become, an anachronism. It’s still as functional and handy (and tactile and tasty) as a sandwich. An electronic book can no more satisfy certain needs than can an electronic sandwich.

Zoran Živković

Of course it is! I can think of many, many reasons. One of them is the practical impossibility and moral abomination of taking a computer with me to the bed.