To Strive, To Seek, To Find

Greg Gephart says:

I cringe every time I see a new add for an electronic book. Electronic gadgetry belongs in the arcade, not on the bookshelf. The drive to force publishers and the public to embrace these new plastic devices is driven by the need for corporate profits. Increasing literacy has absolutely no part in the marketing strategy employed by the e-book sellers. Purchasers of e-books will soon find it difficult to actually read a book because having to page through all the new “apps” will take up too much of the battery life. You can’t just open the cover and start in on the text! There is the NET to surf, calls to make, more stuff to buy!
I am admittedly ‘old school’ in my approach to books and literature. A real book is a pleasure to hold; it’s sacred. I have yet to make a single mark in the margins of any of my text books. A plastic book just doesn’t satisfy the need to experience some tactile pleasure while enriching one’s mind. The plastic is hard, it’s cold, it breaks. The battery runs down and eventualy runs out completely–then what? With reasonable care, a book will last for hundreds of years.
I doubt that any e-book will survive that long outside of a museum, and then what good will it be? It’s operating system will have been obsolete for decades. Nothing but a blank screen to greet the curious. Perhaps the e-book is a telling metaphor for the transitory nauture of our existence. I want permanance.
Holding a real book is like embracing a lover– warm, pliable, responsive to one’s touch. Hands turning, opening pages, finding the familiar that is new again. There is mutual caring, a symbiotic relationship established between the reader and the page. A real book can be purused, carressed, over and over. The print won’t disappear when the subscription runs out or the battery decides you’ve had enough for that day. The choice is ours. We can embrace literature as a whole body-mind experience or we can sell out to the corporate interests and use our plastic to purchase their plastic. The way I see it, it’s like choosing to make love to a warm body or a plastic blow-up doll.

Sarah Williams says:

Electronic books seem sacrilegious to this life-long library goer and book nerd. I have always loved books not only for their content, but for the feeling of a leather binding between my fingers, the musty smell, the feeling of printed ink under my finger tips. As time goes on though, I find myself increasingly using electronic resources, especially for research. I depend on our electronic library database to complete much of my schoolwork. Although, I always have to print the articles still and most recently (for our Brit Lit project), four of five of my resources were in print, from the library. The irony is ever-present in modern research though, because even though these books were from the library, I searched for them on an internet database by using key words and had electronically requested that they all be sent to my local library. Technology has greatly expedited the process of research. This particular instance may have cut hours out of my research time. So, I cannot be blind to this advantage. I admittedly, was barely in college when library databases went electronic. Although I do remember the Dewey decimal system, I never had to write an intensive research paper utilizing card catalogs or to look for anything more complicated than “Black Beauty”. I don’t know that much about the ipad and I cannot ever see myself buying a kindle, but I will not argue that technology can be an incredibly powerful tool.