No ebooks for me: Reading is about more than simply absorbing data

By David McElroy · August 16, 2013

Some people love ebook readers. They love the fact that they can have dozens or hundreds of books with them on a small device. With some of those gadgets, the power can last for days or weeks. You can order any book you want and have it immediately instead of going to a store or waiting for it to be shipped for you. That all sounds great. So why don’t I want one?

I’m thinking about this today because of a discussion that took place on my Facebook page Thursday morning. I posted a picture of a tongue-in-cheek display in a bookstore window. It listed the advantages of “real books” over ebooks, pointing out that they don’t need batteries or software upgrades. And so forth.

More than two dozen people quickly “liked” the picture, some just because they liked a clever promotion and some because they prefer “real books,” as I do. A few people chimed in to argue the superiority of ebooks, explaining that you can get PDFs of books and that you can carry lots of books with you, etc.

Here’s the thing. I understand the technical advantages of ebooks. It’s not that I’ve somehow missed the facts of how they work or what they’re capable of. I don’t need to be “educated” about them. It’s simply that other things matter more to me. For my needs and preferences, real books on real paper matter.

For me — and maybe for you — reading is a much deeper and more tactile experience than just scanning words on a screen. Yes, the words on the page matter a lot, but it’s much more. The feel of the paper matters. It’s a very sensory part of it. Different types of paper feel different and evoke different responses. A cheap paperback with coarse paper feels different — and produces different feelings — than the expensive paper of an leather-bound hardback. I like both, but I associate the two with very different things. And there are various other grades of paper with which I associate various other things.

The smell of the book matters. New books smell a certain way. Books you’ve had for awhile that haven’t been opened because they’ve been sitting on a your bookshelf smell different than when they were new. Older books — whether in a library or in a used bookshop — have yet another smell. It feels almost as though books are telling you who they are and what their stories are — their histories — when you pick them up and feel them and smell them.

When you spend years with these physical books, they’re not just collections of digital words. They feel like living beings that are alive. Every time I think about this, I think about Professor Faber trying to explain to Guy Montag why books were so important to him in “Fahrenheit 451.” If you can read that book and understand what Faber is saying about books, you’ll understand why I want my physical (and very imperfect) library.

I understand that ebook readers — either dedicated devices such as a Kindle or a general-purpose tablet such as an iPad — are useful at times. There are times when you just need searchable technical material. That’s important and it’s valuable sometimes. But it’s not what I really mean when I think of reading — the kind of reading that has come to mean so much to me over the years.

I love books. I love them for the ideas they contain and for the worlds they take me to. But I also love them for the tactile experience of reading them. I love what they physically have meant to me all of my life. I love how they remind me of reading under covers with a flashlight as a child when I was supposed to be asleep. I love how they remind me of the many paperback science fiction novels I tucked inside textbooks to read during classes. I love how they remind me of staying awake through the night many times — thinking over and over again that I’d read just one more chapter. And then another. And another. And another. I was too intoxicated by what I was reading to stop.

This is my experience with real books made out of paper and cloth and cardboard and ink — and I love it. And I love people who share my experience and understand the emotional connection I have to the paper and ink.

I understand why you might love your ebook reader. I don’t mind that. I’m not asking you to make my choice. But don’t think that I simply fail to understand how they work or what their advantages are. I do understand. But I understand something about my relationship with books that goes far deeper than my relationship with a tablet and touchscreen will ever go.

I love real books made of paper and ink for what they’ve meant to me. They’re my friends. I don’t want to give them up.

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I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

After Tampa Bay, Fla., musician Colt Clark had all of his gigs canceled last year for months on end, the entire family felt trapped at home as most of the world was on quarantine lockdown. His wife, Aubree, had an idea that would let Colt make music and involve the whole family in making music videos to share with their friends and family on Facebook. Aubree is a photographer and homeschooling mom to a daughter and two sons, who range in age from 6 to 11. After their friends started asking to share the videos, they made the performances public — and a few of them are now on YouTube, where they go by the name of Colt Clark and the Quarantine Kids. The younger son, Becket, is on drums. The older boy, Cash, plays keyboards, strings and guitars. Dad supplies lead vocals and plays guitar, while 6-year-old Bellamy mostly dances but sometimes does backup vocals. There’s even a dog who makes an occasional appearance. The Clark family has just raised the bar for what I need to create with my future children. And best of all, they seem to be having a great time together. I hope they make you as happy as they make me.

Have you ever wondered how the social media world works for so-called “influencers”? I find it comical, so I thought I’d share with you. I frequently get offers such as what I’m about to describe. And if I’m getting such offers — as a relative nobody in the online world — you can only imagine what people with huge audiences are offered. It starts with an email appealing to my ego: “We came across your online presence and we LOVE your style. We’d love to have you as one of our Brand Ambassadors. To celebrate our new [Brand Name] collection, we want to give you a FREE Watch so you can post a picture of you wearing it and drive more exposure to our brand.” Did you hear that? They love me. They want me to be seen wearing their cheap $59 watch so other people will think, “If this amazing influencer wears that, surely I should buy one.” They even offer me commissions on the watches sold from people clicking from my site. So the next time you see some alleged “influencer” touting something online or on social media, remember that this is what it’s probably all about. It’s laughable.

Modern culture is going insane. The latest evidence comes from the effort to redefine children’s author Dr. Seuss as a racist whose books should be banned. Why? Because a few images in those books don’t meet modern political standards. The drawing you see here is one of those “dangerously racist images,” and it comes from the Dr. Seuss classic, “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” The book catalogs all the wild diversity seen by a child on one street, including the offending drawing of a Chinese boy. What’s racist about it? Apparently, it was racist to show the boy eating rice, wearing a funny hat, using chopsticks and (worst of all) having eyes represented by a slit. (The bearded man near him has dots for eyes, but that’s apparently OK.) In other words, the stereotypes are considered racist today. (Oddly, the culture warriors who fret over such things are never concerned if a white southerner is depicted as ignorant trash living in a trailer. Some stereotypes are great, especially if the left hates those people anyway.) Theodore Geisel — the name of the real-life Dr. Seuss — was a product of his time and nobody at that time would have seen any of this as racist. Using stereotypes and exaggerations is how artists depict differences in simple ways. You can argue that it’s better to achieve the end result in a different way, but it’s insane to pretend that everybody from the past should have his work erased because it doesn’t match the preferences of modern leftists. Unfortunately, the company that publishes Dr. Seuss books has caved to the insane people — and six of his popular works will no longer be published. The world has simply gone insane.

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