There’s nothing quite as nice as kicking back on the patio with a good book, and letting it absorb you for a few hours. Even with my jumpy attention span, I can appreciate that.
There has always been something tangible about printed books that I enjoy far more than the dry, sterile process that is reading something from a lit screen.
A few years ago, the e-reader saw a meteoric popularity spike. It boasted enormous memory capacity, cool features and the ability to hold hundreds of books all at once. There was Amazon’s Kindle, the Canadian-made Kobo, and whichever gadgets Indigo, Sony and all the other gadgets other companies made, to cash in on the craze. A handful of melodramatic tech sites hysterically proclaimed the impending “end of printed books,” on account of the growing ebook fad. There was a lot of hype. I was subject to that hype. Enter: My final year of post-secondary education. I was looking for a way to “beat the system,” and not break the bank on necessary texts for my classes.
Stage one of my plan was to (partially) gut one of my pay cheques and buy myself an e-reader. The second stage was to download many PDF copies, for free, off the Internet as I could find, followed by me purchasing cheaper ebook copies of many of the texts I needed for classes, for a fraction of the cost of the physical copies.
The outcome of my plan entailed me finding very few copies of any of the books I needed, in PDF or ebook form. Those few copies I could find and put on my e-reader were rendered in such a tiny font, the text looked more like punctuation than letters.
I ended up just borrowing most of the books I needed for my classes from the campus and town libraries. The e-reader ended up gathering dust until the summer after I graduated, when I took it upon myself to read some of the free ebooks that came with it, often switching over to physical copies.
I still prefer tangible, printed books. I don’t think I was the only one who went through such a phase and came out on the other end with an appreciation for physical copies.
For a while in 2011, e-readers and tablets excelled in terms of sales, surpassing print-format books. That trend reversed very quickly, and the number of sales and use of e-readers has declined since, along with a corresponding, but small, rise in the sale of physical books.
There are still plenty of people buying ebooks and e-readers—because hey, they’re convenient—but the amount of profit companies like Amazon have been able to pull in from the sales of those things has seen a small, but steady decrease since their heyday in the early “twenty-teens.”
There is something deeply satisfying and warm about print on paper that no other medium has been able to encapsulate or imitate. Can I specifically, logically explain to you what that is? No. But it’s there. Another advantage of physical books is that they don’t need time to “boot up,” or load pages. No matter how advanced and tricked out with bells and whistles e-readers or tablets are, they take time to load, like any other device that utilizes memory. Meanwhile, you start reading a printed book the moment you crack it open.
There’s something far less satisfying, too, about filling up a virtual bookshelf. “Click, click, oh look, here’s a list of things I’ve read that I can sentimentally scroll through. How satisfying,” said no one, ever. When you finish a physical book, you put it up on a shelf. You have a conversation piece, a badge of honour, and maybe even fond memories every time you glance at the spine of the book, remembering where it took you or what it gave you, when you read it.
I still have that old e-reader form my university days. On occasion, I’ll take it on a trip and toss some stuff on it to keep me occupied on a long trip. It’s lighter, easier to pack and more convenient than print books, but it aint got nothin’ on the real thing.
