A love story
We download music and movies, and we get our information from screens. So why do we still read books?
In the new exhibit at the Boston Public Library, "John Adams Unbound ," you get the almost creepy feeling that the man is in the room, or just stepped out. Most of Adams's 3,700 surviving books are set in tall cases arranged in a concave arc at one end of the room. Look at the individual books opened in glass cases, and the feeling is stronger. The margins are full of Adams's impulsive comments -- some to himself, some clearly to an imagined reader -- written neatly in brown ink. His fiery disagreements with Mary Wollstonecraft's defense of the French Revolution add up to 10,000 passionate words, penned furiously throughout his copy.
In all its variety, the Adams exhibit demonstrates the complexity and power of books. It also suggests questions so elemental that they're almost never asked. Why do books have such power over us, anyway? And why do books, as a human artifact, never become obsolete?
They're timely questions for Boston. Besides the Adams exhibit, beginning Friday thousands of bibliophiles will swarm the 30th annual Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair, with 120 exhibitors, at the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center. For sellers, buyers, and lookers, the rarities on display are objects of fascination, craving, even love. But books don't need to be rare to be cherished. "They're almost human, in a way," said exhibitor Anne Bromer of Boston's Bromer Booksellers . "How many times have we finished a book and caressed it, rubbed our hands over the cover, as if not ready to let it go?"
Publishing profits haven't grown much of late. Still, publishers are turning out books by the billion. Bowker , publisher of the reference "Books in Print," reported 375,000 new books published in English-speaking countries in 2004, the latest year for which world figures are available. The daily news is filled with best-selling books and authors -- Barack Obama, Bob Woodward, J.K. Rowling. Giant bookstores are still being built, while music superstores -- only a few years old -- are already going out of business.
Alternatives to the book have been tried. The latest is the
"With the electronic paper display technology, it's much closer to a paper kind of reading experience," explained Ron Hawkins, Sony's vice president of portable reader systems. The device can hold the equivalent of 80 books, and has access to a 10,000-volume bookstore. Will it sell? Hawkins would not give a number of Readers sold thus far, but said, "We are very encouraged by initial sales." Nevertheless, expectations are limited. "We have no visions of the Reader replacing printed books," said Hawkins.
Invented in late Roman times, originally called a codex, the book had most of the features it has today: rectangular pages with lines of text on both sides, numbered and bound at one edge, protected with some kind of cover. Probably the oldest is the Codex Sinaiticus , a Bible made in the fourth century, parts of which are held by several European libraries.
"The codex was spread by Christian missionaries, who wanted something portable," said Harvard historian Ann Blair, a specialist in the history of the book. It was "more compact, you could pack more words into it. It was more convenient than carrying a bucket of scrolls around with you." Books can be stored in tight rows, and because the pages are pressed together, they're relatively protected against crumpling or tearing, sunlight, water, bugs, even fire. Portions of a ninth-century book of psalms were recently found, still readable, in an Irish bog.
Though e-books are freely available for downloading, most people find reading a book on a computer uncomfortable. "I read 'Dracula' in electronic form," said Timothy Shanahan, professor of urban education at the University of Illinois and president of the International Reading Association, "and when I would come back to it, I would not remember where I was as well as I expected. I rarely have that happen with a book."
His experience has research support. A March 2005 French study cited in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies compared retention in readers who used "a mobile e-book device" to those who used a book. The result: " T he e-book presence hinders recall of assimilated information whilst the presence of the paper support [i.e., the book] tends to facilitate it."
Beyond the pleasure of touch, some book lovers suggest that effective reading is physical work, like gardening. One reader used the word "geography." You pick up the book, open it and turn the pages one by one with your fingers, look away from the page and back, stick a bookmark in it, hunt for a passage read earlier, leave it on a tabletop to beckon to you later. You might fondle a book. If you despise it, you might attack it with a pen, like John Adams, or throw it across the room.
"There's a feeling that you're moving through something," said Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, who calls the Sony Reader "underwhelming." "I'm reading a fat book now," she said, "and I'm 280 pages into it. The process of accumulating pages under my left thumb gives me a clear sense of having traveled a certain distance. It's as if I'm halfway through the world this author has created."
Some think a younger generation, accustomed to reading newspapers online, may eventually take to devices like the Sony Reader. "I think you will see a change in 20 years," said Thomas Horrocks, associate librarian for collections at Harvard's Houghton Library of rare books. "When people get into their 30s and 40s who have never had the idea of reading that we have, [using an e-book reader] will not seem a big change -- it will be something they're quite comfortable with."
However, there's one advantage the printed book will always have. Computer technology changes rapidly, and today's innovation is obsolete tomorrow. The Sony Reader "will be outdated in 10 years," said Blair, the Harvard historian. "Books can sit in people's attics, ignored for hundreds of years, and they're still usable. But what do you do with Granddad's computer?"
