Freedom author Jonathan Franzen thinks ebooks aren’t permanent enough, that the digital form doesn’t have the permanence of print. He’s talking about the feel of a book printed permanently onto the pages.
It may be a surprise (I do work for a company selling technology—interactive voice response systems—after all), I agree with him. Unfortunately, I think ebooks are the books with the real longevity. And I don’t think it’s a question of which we like better.
“Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do,” Franzen told an audience at the Hay festival in Cartagena, Colombia, according to the Guardian. “When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place.”
I get that. There’s a feel of permanency you just don’t get from a screen that three seconds before was showing you a YouTube video of some kid picking his nose or whatever.
“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it,” Franzen said. “They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around.”
Preaching to the choir, buddy. One of my favorite books is an old hardback copy of War and Peace that’s been in my family a few generations. The cover is torn in places and the pages are yellowed with age. It’s about 70 years old, I think—my grandmother’s originally.
Reading it, I can feel the passage of time in it. The age enhances the experience of the novel, which was written over 150 years ago. It feels different than the paperback copies of War and Peace I pick up at the bookstore. I don’t sense any age in a new paperback version, let alone on a digital screen.
But in the end it’s a question of morals—or it will be. At some point we’ll have depleted our forests enough that paper books will be unthinkable. Our morals as a society will shift so that killing trees to make books will be frowned upon and then outlawed.
So as much as I agree with Franzen on his point about ebooks, I don’t think we’ll have much choice in the matter. Printed books will disappear. Ebooks will be the only books we know.
