A recent New York Times report showed that e-book sales are declining while printed book sales are doing well. Over at Lit Hub, Adam Sternbergh argues that the printed book is going nowhere, for at least another 500 years:
Whatever medium the music is delivered in, the song remains the same—once it gets to your headphones, it doesn’t really matter what form it arrived in (esoteric preferences for the “warmth” of vinyl notwithstanding.
It’s different when you read a book. When you read a physical book, or you read an e-book, the physical experience of reading that book is different. It looks different. It feels different. It even smells different. Your memory of having read it will be different.
One response
Here’s why I find that argument unpersuasive. Let me start by saying that I don’t think the paper book is going anywhere anytime soon, and I don’t deny that there is a distinct difference between reading a paper book and reading an e-book. But we haven’t yet had a generation of people who’ve been raised reading e-books, who don’t have the same romantic and nostalgic connections to paper books that every generation which has read before has attached to the physical book. I expect that when that “mostly ebook” generation comes of age and more importantly, becomes the primary purchaser of books, you’ll see a sudden and massive switch in the industry, and the paper book will become a novelty, much as vinyl is now in the music industry. That won’t be for many many years, but that change is coming.
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