And I love the prospect of e-reading -- the immediacy it offers, the
increasing wealth of its resources. But I'm discovering, too, a hidden
property in printed books, one of the reasons I will always prefer them.
They do nothing.
I love the typefaces and the bindings and the feel of well-made paper.
But what I really love is their inertness. No matter how I shake
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," mushrooms don't tumble out of the
upper margin, unlike the "Alice" for the iPad. I never have the
lingering sense that there is another window open behind page 133 of
"the lives and times of archy and mehitabel." I can tell the weather
from these books only by the way their pages curl when it's hot and
humid.
And more. There is never a software glitch, like the one that keeps me
from turning the page in ebrary. And there's nothing meta about the
metadata of real books. You can't strip away details about the printing
of the book -- copyright information, place and date of publication --
without actually tearing off the binding, title page, half-title and
colophon. The book is the book, whereas, in electronic formats, the book
often seems to be merely the text.