“Among all the gifts of the electronic age, one of the most paradoxical might be to illuminate something we are beginning to trade away: the particular history, visible and invisible, that can be passed down through the vessel of an old book, inscribed by the hands and the minds of readers who are gone.”
Amanda Katz writes an essay for NPR books about the historical and sentimental qualities of print literature, and the failure of their electronic counterparts to preserve these idiosyncratic legacies. Previously owned books carry with them stories of their own – contained within the marginalia left from past readers, or a byproduct of the simple fact that many times a change in ownership signals an unwitting death. Katz asks the question of how libraries of significance will be passed down to following generations in the era of the E-book, and considers the subjective ways in which we value literature.
