Struck me in church, standing there reading the Bible from an iPad, that the value of sacred texts may fade or alter, being indistinguishable from any other momentary array of pixels upon a slim universal reader. Being naturally physcial-focused, my toddler children may come to not grasp the "specialness" of some books - where I want them to learn value beyond bits and pixels.
But the specialness of any book is precisely related to its contents, not its physical manifestation. The Bible is thousands of years old, and yet even the oldest physical copies begin to crumble after a few hundred years.
Teaching a reverence for physical objects is in a very real sense untruthful... the ideas they contain are what should (or ought) to matter.
It's not the reverence for physical objects I'm getting at. It's that digital content is ethereal, easily lost amid the terabytes ... while physical books bring a substantial reality to the content. Ideas can be lost in the deluge of limitless content; physical manifestation thereof requires choosing and limiting which content will persist.
I think nothing of adding hundreds or thousands of books to my digital reader, and think nothing of forgetting any of them therein. I select and prune with care which ideas and content will fill the limited capacity of my hard-earned hand-made physical bookcase, keeping only the greatest ideas and making that concentration of what matters accessible to the young minds who are growing to peruse them.
I totally disagree. The immediate "specialness" of the hot coffeeshop barista is not her "spiritual manifestation". Part of the uniqueness is presentation. Size, shape, weight, age, smell...I'm talking about books... the roughness of the pages etc. Bookreaders reduce this to a lowest common denominator that limits sensory bandwidth and cheapens the experience.
Can a person have the same religious fervor with an ephemeral Bible/Koran etc on a Kindle, as they would for a leather bound, gold-edged King James Version with the red tassel bookmark? And the cutout pages that let you thumb to the right chapter?
These things should only be tools because in the end we're all animals. And, trying to virtualize everything limits us to half of our birthright.
I don't disagree that a physical experience is nice, and I'm not even going to touch the "hot girl" point, since sex is one of the few things that is almost entirely physical.
But the physical experience of a book is completely orthogonal to the true nature of the book: that is, its content. I actually prefer physical books to e-texts, I like the experience better. But I don't delude myself that that's somehow more "true." I also like reading outdoors on a cool autumn day with the scent of woodsmoke in the air, but that's no more essential to a book than its physical medium.
The essence of a book is the thoughts contained therein, everything else is peripheral.
Struck me in church, standing there reading the Bible from an iPad, that the value of sacred texts may fade or alter, being indistinguishable from any other momentary array of pixels upon a slim universal reader. Being naturally physcial-focused, my toddler children may come to not grasp the "specialness" of some books - where I want them to learn value beyond bits and pixels.