A dear friend told me more than ten years ago that her
physical bookshelves were emptying. For reasons of space saving, she had gone
from squeezing in more volumes to replacing them with eBooks. She’s an avid
reader, for whom books are not an occasional pastime or a distraction. Books
are her passion.
Mind you, she’s also
a librarian.
The day a librarian is giving up her stacks of physical
paper books is also the day our reality has moved to the ethernet.
That day is almost here.
Has your bank been imploring you to forgo paper statements?
Have your utility companies stopped sending paper bills and even offered
discounted bills if you go to “autopay?” Has your doctor been sending medical
test orders to the lab virtually, no paper orders anywhere? Have your
plane/train/bus tickets gone to an app on your phone with no paper backup
needed?
You know what I’m saying.
It saves some trees. Hooray. It also saves space. It moves records
of reality from our physical spaces to another realm, one that is microscopic
by comparison.
This post from some
months ago got me thinking about my post today. Even traditional publishers
have realized the precious space of weatherized warehouses need not be, because
POD books (Print On Demand) have become indistinguishable in quality and will
do for those who like to hold a physical paper book. They print a physical book
only after it’s ordered and paid for/sold.
Despite the title of this post, it is not about the
afterlife. It is about the digital world replacing the physical in many
spheres. This leaves more room for us, wretched creatures, while we’re still
inhabiting the physical.
5 comments:
Your comments are obviously on target. I'm one of those who is dragging my feet on having everything computerized. I like to see my bills on paper in hand. Of course, it would help if the USPS were better and more reliable. It's terrible where I am.
The digital world is ephemeral. I still have the love letters my husband and I wrote to each other. But the emails we sent each other daily are gone. Like it or not, the digital is taking up more space in our lives.
I have some eBooks but I am not ready to stop adding physical books to my library. One of my treasured books is letters written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. If Scott were here today, he'd dash off emails that would be gone in a day or two. Nothing to save, and he wrote such beautiful, interesting letters.
Love,
Janie
I love ebooks, partly because I don't have the physical space to hold all the books I want to purchase. But I do have to say that I often remember a book read on paper much better than an ebook. There's something about the screen that makes it fly out of my brain. :)
I can see the logic of that. But, like Jenni, I don't absorb information that I don't physically read. And technology changes so frequently, e-books, like websites and ezines, are ephemeral. "Include me out," as Sam Goldwyn would say. :-)
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