Day 1

 As a writer and active blogger, I am very aware albeit uncomfortably so, with how my relationship to information has changed since the Internet.  I am aware that large chunks of my days which, ten years ago would have been devoted to reading Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card and Tolkien, are now devoted to reddit articles, blogspot and online news sources.  I am aware that my love for fiction, science fiction and fantasy have been challenged with replacement by a need to learn news, non-news and read droll articles on the 25 things you thought you knew that you never knew about yourself or something.

I think this access to endless information has acted more as a bully than as a tease for me; I can’t get through an article on the flooding in Colorado without being intimidated by a reference to a Colorado senator I know little about. If I don’t research it, I feel lazy. Because how hard is it to google a name?  On some level, this infinity of information makes me incapable of dismissing any facts which may not only be irrelevant to my life, but will also completely derail my initial search for information in the first place.

             So, that’s my first model of an Internet search—one gone awry by distraction. The second however is one I’m equally guilty of conducting: the search begun by distraction. The 20-40 minutes we waste every day scrolling across MSN’s homepage or Instagram or Facebook, absorbing virtually nothing unless a friend has maybe posted pictures of her honeymoon in Bermuda  in which case we now absorb that our friend has gotten married recently. Of course, during this kind of research we also occasionally discover that the ozone layer smells faintly of geraniums or that tomorrow is the now defunct planet Pluto’s birthday, or that the first ever bookless library has opened up in Texas. Of all places.

            I am not denying the value I place upon the information highway; without it, most of my friends would have grandchildren before I knew they’d ever gotten married in Bermuda or elsewhere, but I also wouldn’t have access to the daily opportunity for the amazing conversations taking place all over the world about LGBT rights, gender inequality in the workplace, or the dangers posed by the NSA to the rights of every American and the greater majority of Europeans. These are conversations that start my articles, blogs and poetry. These are conversations that spark friendships or at the very least, informative acquaintances.

Books, on the other hand, are self-sustaining worlds. There are no blue highlighted and underlined words begging you to break the reality of what you’re reading to find out what pops up when you click on Texas penitentiary. (Oh the possibilities). A book offers simply the world between the two covers. You are armed only with the information you had before beginning the book and that is all you will need.

Ok, you say. So you’ve made your argument for books vs. the virtual world, but you’ve said nothing about books vs. ebooks. Which is the real issue.

Wrong, I have placed the internet and print books in opposition for a reason. Give me a break.  Ebooks aren’t in danger of outdating print media, the Internet is.

Has there ever been a point in history when we’ve had less time for reflection? Has there ever been a point in history when we decided it would be a better use of our time to consider the sum total of the distracted observances of the 300 or so people that we “know” (yes, I’m looking at you, Facebook), than to sit with the 300 pages of reflective, internal and brilliant observations from someone who DOES THIS FOR A LIVING? 

No, but why? Because we’re all so tied up with ebooks? Is print media in danger because of ebooks, or is it in danger because of our attention spans?

Book lovers everywhere who grew up on the Boxcar kids, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, Goosebumps and L.M. Montgomery instinctively draw arms when this conversation arises about the irrelevancy of print books. We are the people who cried when we realized we were too old for those books even though we knew they’d been replaced by something better. We are the people who underlined and bookmarked and made sure to write our names in every single cover of every single book we ever bought because we wanted to own it forever. We are the people who remember the day Starbucks came to Barnes & Noble because we were totally there first.

            So what is it, then? Just nostalgia?

            No.

            It is certainly nostalgia that began my fight against the disappearance of books and print media dominated libraries, but that’s not what I came up with when it was done.

            If we still believe in the idea that literature is art, we will not forget its right, and the right of all authors and creators, to see their intellectual ideas exist and persist in the form of print. Why? For the same reason that photography didn’t outdate the canvas. New mediums in art do not make the old ones irrelevant.

            The reason we fight against the digitization of art is because of the definition of art! It is because art is a spiritual experience, a human and hands on experience. The farther we place ourselves from the thing that is art, the farther we become from its existence and the less we believe in its reality.

            A book, you know the one with a spine a cover and your name inside in your eight year old handwriting is a thing you can own. Forever. You can watch it age with you, you can remember when its pages weren’t yellow. You can pick it up after 10 years and feel guilty because of the dust on your fingertips. You can find that flower you pressed inside it when you were heartbroken. You can look at lines underlined in purple from your best friend when she was mad at you. It’s something like a high school yearbook except minus the shame. It’s irreplaceable. And the story of its story in your life can not be repeated by an ebook.

            The difference between a book and an ebook is that a book exists alone as a WHOLE, reliant upon nothing. Any book you could read on a Kindle is just a part of this conduit or placeholder that is your technological device. Holding a book in your hands as a material substance validates its solitary existence and excludes the possibility of all competing knowledge or demands upon your time. You are not sitting in front of a computer, invited to make outside connections and references. You are in hickville BOOK land and you better just concentrate on the information in front of you. You better make sense of it because it’s the only thing you have between your hands and no one and nothing is telling you that there’s better things you could be doing or learning. It exists outside of a Kindle, outside of a computer screen, outside of the habitable technological world.

            It’s a book. A BOOK book.