books that burn turn into torches

Read an inter­est­ing arti­cle in the NYT blog by Tim Parks, “E-Books Can’t Burn”. It’s a good read, but the com­ments impressed me even more than the post itself: such pas­sion on either side! Surely a sign of par­a­digm change, except as usual it isn’t clear where we’re going. Of course, the paper-based hard­lin­ers don’t show up on the blog, only those who swing both ways.

It seems to me that the orig­i­nal arti­cle missed out on the com­mu­nity aspect of elec­tronic read­ing: in my life as a writer and reader of Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture and texts who doesn’t live in an English-speaking coun­try, this aspect has almost come to dom­i­nate my lit­er­ary expe­ri­ence: the abil­ity to com­ment; to post mate­r­ial and have it be seen and read almost instantly; com­mu­ni­ties of friends spring­ing up around read­ing and writ­ing (e.g. Fic­tio­naut, Red Lemon­ade etc.) Anno­ta­tions no longer only in the mar­gin. Of course, it can all get too much.

In my own e-book read­ing prac­tice, I use mobile devices (I own both a Kin­dle and an iPad) for read­ing on the go, rarely very focused, or to check (free) first chap­ters and sam­ples, or to keep books with me that I might want to look at, or as a repos­i­tory for books that I might want to read once but not ever again (and there­fore I don’t want to own them). But my cen­tral read­ing expe­ri­ence must still be vis­ceral, and it is based on phys­i­cally own­ing books that I love, too.

As an avid reader and writer I still remain split right through the mid­dle regard­ing the ebook or print book ques­tion (the “or” is, I think, gen­er­ally over­rated): I carry both paper and portable. Some­times I wake up in the morn­ing with the taste of a printed page in my mouth…not that I’m in the habit of lick­ing paper, but my entire metab­o­lism grew in the midst of a large col­lec­tion of paper-based books and my being grew towards them. So much so that I phys­i­cally feel the need to go into book stores or libraries some­times just to be around books. Though I am begin­ning to feel the same about online scents and sen­sa­tions: the need to see what’s been writ­ten, said, played online has been such a strong fac­tor in my life over the past 20 years that I can hardly remem­ber a world with­out it. And you can’t either probably?

I remem­ber my father in the 1980s hand­ing me a book that my grand­fa­ther had kept hid­den from the Nazis. It made it the more pre­cious because it could have been burnt but this par­tic­u­lar copy hadn’t been burned, you see. The fact that it might have burnt made it so valu­able to him, to me, and even to all of you who haven’t even held it, because I think you know what I’m talk­ing about: the book was printed free­dom, pure pas­sion, a force, not just a col­lec­tion of flam­ma­ble mate­r­ial plus words. Books that burn turn into torches.

As this sum­mary of 14 (!)  book burn­ings through­out his­tory shows (see all pho­tos on this page), book burn­ing has been almost a sport for more than a thou­sand years. Who knows what it’d do to soci­ety if the burn­ing would be replaced by Dr Strangelove’s press of a button?

“You must write every sin­gle day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like lad­ders to sniff books like per­fumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” —Ray Bradbury