The hardworking staff owns a Kindle and an iPad, so we’re not saying ebooks have no place in the literary world.
It’s just that ebooks don’t replace the real thing.
From the Weekend Wall Street Journal:
What an E-Reader Can’t Download
The books on my shelf bring back memories of the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met.
My wife recently gave me an electronic reader, and I look forward to using it to sample the latest novels, nonfiction and poetry. At the click of a button, as if rubbing a genie from a bottle, I’ll be able to summon thousands of books to the screen on my lap.
The books on our living room shelf, on the other hand, were acquired through hours of browsing in bookstores. Lined up at attention from floor to ceiling, they stand as touchstones of my personal geography—bright reminders of places I’ve been, things I’ve seen, and people I’ve met.
While sipping coffee this morning, for example, I glanced at the spine of Lance Morrow’s “Fishing in the Tiber” and thought instantly of Cleveland, even though the city doesn’t figure at all in Morrow’s lively collection of magazine essays. I’d gone to Ohio in December of 1991 to see my friend Stuart and his wife Anula, and they drove me into Cleveland for dinner at an Italian restaurant. Before eating, we braved a bitter gust from Lake Erie to visit a nearby bookstore, where Morrow’s book landed in my hand.
And etc.
That goes double for Internet book searches, as this recent New Republic (sorry, subscription required) piece noted:
It is a curious quality of the Internet that it can be composed of an unfathomable multitude and, at the same time, almost always deliver to the user the bits that feed her already-held interests and confirm her already-held beliefs. It points to a paradox that is, perhaps, one of the most critical of our time: To have access to everything may be to have nothing in particular.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the hardworking staff collected early editions of Ring Lardner’s works, prowkling endless (and maddeningly un-alphabetized) old bookstores. We eventually assembled a respectable array of old volumes – except for Own Your Own Home, a copy of which stubbornly eluded us.
Until . . . finally . . . yes! . . . we found it.
Nowadays it wouldn’t take 15 years – it would take 15 seconds.
Ebay had an ad campaign not long ago with the theme The Thrill of the Hunt.
More like “The Shill of the Hunt” we’d say.
Campaign Outsider 
Sir, no offense but you sound 20th century. I am a new convert to e-readers and while I have my issues, I also find that the “real thing” argument is kind of pointless.
First of all, what is the real thing? Many people confuse a physical object with the text itself. I mean, sure, finding my grandfather’s hidden copy of Fanny Hill was awesome when I was twelve. And I still seek a copy of some 1969 mass market paperback of The Ginger Man, which is probably my favorite novel. But those are objects that are treasured for accidental circumstances. “Tonight a rare sun of spring” will be as evocative, Sebastian Dangerfield as cool, no matter whether you read him on a Kindle or a physical book.
I know that the Internet has changed the way we read. We don’t look at it in terms of a Longfellow style travels by the fireside, we consume data. But that’s a social change and e-readers aren’t the cause of that. Furthermore, whether it’s a positive or negative remains to be seen.
The problem with e-readers is that not enough books are books are being transferred, and the state of copyright law often provides an incentive to be lazy about this transfer. I’m not the biggest Google fan, but they are doing the world a great service by digitizing all books. Unfortunately, they can’t give you access to those books, and trying to locate IP owners is too expensive.
And because the ebook businesses follow the market, and people are stupid, they only really bother to sell books that a lot of people like to read. So if it was published in the last 10 years, you’ll find it (including Harry Potter from October!). But if you look for anything beyond Stephen King and Eat, Pray, Love you’re out of luck.
In the last week, I’ve failed to find ebooks of e.e.cummings’s post 1923 poetry, John Ashbery’s Self-Portraits in a Convex Mirror, the Library of America crime collection, and a whole slew other writers like Chester Himes and George MacDonald Fraser. These are all books that are in print and enjoy modest but steady sales. If you go into the 19th century, you’ll find free or 99 cent versions of everything that’s on Project Gutenberg, but good luck finding an ebook of Poe or Maupassant that doesn’t totally suck. And these are popular writers!!! You can’t weep or wear black at age 16 without thinking of Madeline Usher.
The main problem is not that ebooks aren’t “the same” or whatever curmudgeonly complaint I’ve heard in a hundred different variants, but that the ebook ecosystem is, as of yet, not conducive to the survival of excellent books that aren’t super mega hits.
On the subject of reading, here’s a short story called “Bookcruncher” by Tibor Fischer, whose Collector Collector is AWESOME and unavailable in ebook format.
http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/library/fischer01.html
“Sound 20th century”? That’s disappointing, Arafat. I was going for 19th.
Edit: I should add that the reason why I seek the 1969 paperback edition of The Ginger Man with the dark green cover is because that’s the one I first read. I hate the cover they have now for the edition that’s currently extant. Sebastian Dangerfield has dark hair, not orange.
Edit 2: Also, if we’d had e-readers in the earlies, I wouldn’t have had to plunk down a hundred bucks on Songs of Action to learn that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a crappy poet.
Thanks J for once again ‘reading’ for me.
The Kindle I was given for a gift has sat unopened for months, no draw, perhaps no associate memories attached, certainly no tactile appreciation of heft, good (or not) paper,etc.. I did just purchase a few dozen books for my new grandchild many of which I recall from my son’s era.
And someone has copied a Suzy Squirrel book for me( in blk & white) which I intend to hand color for same child, hoping to foster a love of that entity, a book. Once, I had a student who arranged his hundreds of books by color; what fun I had learning where a particular book was. We all take information in differently; some of us resist change picking and choosing our tools,
our centuries. Like my photographs, I want the, ironic, instant graphic access of my books
around me, not in a container I must go to to see them. I’ll get there eventually but not to the
dismissal of all I cherish, it’s just another tool.
Now back to The Five Forty Five to Cannes, a library book !
Mazel tov, grandma!
When I was a child in the 50s, I remember seeing a photo (certainly pre-digital) of my uncle’s home with a wall of bookcases filled with books. Even though I was already a reader, I think that image is what started me on the idea of amassing my own library. Of course, time passed, and I long ago had to get more room, or thin out my collection, and there’s always the thought of what am I doing with them once they;re read and just collecting dust on a shelf? Fast forward to the digital age, and I still have an attraction to the heft of a book, as opposed to the weightless mass (?) of an electronic edition of an ebook. Then, there’s always the fear of buying an ebook, amassing an elibrary, and having my reader die at a relatively young (by my library standards) age and watching my collection vaporize into the ether, so it’s always something. As ever in the computer world it’s still backup, backup, backup. Before I get relegated to the 20th century luddites who are just anti reader, while I don’t own one, I have been listening to an audio book on my MP3 player, which I downloaded from my library system (NobleNorth), so I’m not anti technology, just cheap and slow to buy one.