ninme

The Times - E-books will never be our friends
Traditional books are here to stay. Some things are worth cutting down a tree for, by Ben Macintyre

The death of the traditional book has been predicted, wrongly, from the very start of the digital revolution. This week, as British publishers announced the further digitisation of their lists, the demise of the book was announced yet again. The electronic book would replace the paper variety, many of us believed, as surely as the grey squirrel has driven out the red. Yet this has not happened: the printed book is the same object, in essence, that it always was. Music, film and television have all transferred rapidly to digital format; reading in short form - blogs, journalism, e-mail - has thrived on the web since its inception.

But long-form literature has proved stubbornly resistant. Alongside those of us writing premature obituaries for the paper book were the traditionalists, insisting that the act of reading is so sacred that no machine could replicate it. In 1994, the novelist Annie Proulx declared: “Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever.”…

Some books are worth sacrificing a tree to make; others are not, and that is the distinction that the electronic book offers. Ruskin once observed that literature is “divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time”. The books of all time will remain on paper, but those of the hour will increasingly be digital: the airport novel, the reference book, the celebrity memoir. A personal library will no longer be the repository of unread paperbacks, but a genuine index to individuality, as it was in the days when books were rare and precious.

Annie Proulx was wrong: people will read novels, including hers, on a screen, but whether they then decide to own the book, and keep it as a reflection of who they are, will depend on how much they love her writing.

We passed through a Borders over the weekend and Peter’s antennae went up and he drifted off course over to a little kiosk where they were displaying some new ebook. He poked at it a while, as I stood by rolling my eyes with derision, then finally pronounced: “The res is still too low.” And we left.