I am by no means a person who thinks that we all should return to our roots and forget everything that the age of innovations has to offer. I believe it is possible to both keep up-to-date with everything that’s new and not forget about who we are and where we came from. There’s always a possibility for compromise.
My e-book is one of my favorite things; I love it fondly. I can’t quite imagine my life without it now. It’s really convenient! It lets me carry tens of books around, wherever I go, and I don’t even want to think of what that would look like with actual printed books.
At the same time, I seriously suspect that people are forgetting about the aesthetic aspect of reading, and that next generations may know nothing about it. And it’s not the contents of books I’m talking about now; I mean the very process of reading that engages all your senses and becomes an important part of the experience. Because apart from the words that form sentences that form chapters there is also a soft sound of rustling pages, a smell of paper and printing ink and the feeling of a book cover under your fingers. There is special history and energy about real books; something a great deal more than an e-book can offer.
So do printed books gradually turn into something rare and special, something intended for true esthetes and not for general public?
I wonder if in the future people will sigh over the aesthetics of e-books.