Submitted: The Two Sides Team January 9, 2013

It’s no wonder a recent Wall Street Journal essay on the longevity of print books is circulating the web faster than “Fifty Shades” climbed bestseller lists.
January 7 2013

by Husna Haq, CS Monitor

It’s no wonder a recent Wall Street Journal essay on the longevity of print books is circulating the web faster than “Fifty Shades” climbed bestseller lists.

It is, after all, music to many bibliophiles’ ears.

In “Don’t Burn Your Books – Print is Here to Stay,” writer Nicholas Carr argues just that and makes a convincing case that digital books will complement, not replace, traditional print books.

“Lovers
of ink and paper, take heart,” Carr begins. “Reports of the death of
the printed book may be exaggerated.” Despite the initial prognoses
about publishing going all digital by 2015, digital may very well be a
supporting, not starring, actor in years to come, says Carr.

“It may be that e-books, rather than replacing printed books, will
ultimately serve a role more like that of audio books – a complement to
traditional reading, not a substitute,” he writes.

He outlines the evidence: A recent Pew Research Center
poll revealed that 89 percent of readers said they had read at least
one printed book during the preceding 12 months. By comparison, only 30
percent reported reading even one e-book in the same period.

What’s
more, after “the initial e-book explosion,” the growth rate for e-book
sales is slowing from triple-digits to about 34 percent in 2012,
suggesting that initial spike in growth was an aberration, a reflection
of the technology’s enthusiastic early adopters. In fact, a survey by
Bowker Market Research revealed that 59 percent of Americans said they
had “no interest” in purchasing an e-reader.

That may be because
Americans are shifting from single-purpose e-readers to multi-purpose
tablets. As the article pointed out, sales of e-readers are plunging
while those of tablets are skyrocketing.

But Carr sees something
deeper in the trend. E-readers have been particularly well-suited to
genre novels, like thrillers and romances, “the most disposable of
books” that we tend to read quickly and not want to hang onto. By
contrast, he notes, we’re less likely to go digital on genres like
literary fiction and narrative nonfiction. “Readers of weightier fare,”
he posits, “seem to prefer the heft and durability, the tactile
pleasures, of what we still call ‘real books’ – the kind you can set on a
shelf.”

If that’s the case, argues Carr, e-books may be just
another format, “an even lighter-weight, more disposable paperback” that
readers use for certain genres, the same way we purchase mass-market
fiction in paperback and cookbooks in hardcover.

Quite simply,
print and digital serve different purposes, Carr concludes. The
clinching evidence? According to Pew, nearly 90 percent of e-book
readers continue to read physical books.

We’re very inclined to
believe Carr’s argument, not simply because we want to, but because the
evidence, statistical and anecdotal, is there. After all, for many of
us, books are more than simply a collection of words that can be
consumed on screens as readily as in print. Just as often, if not more,
they bring to us tactile escape, visual pleasure, satisfactory heft,
even pride and distinction as they trumpet their owners refined literary
taste, sitting handsomely-bound on hardwood shelves.

As Carr concluded, “There’s something about a crisply printed, tightly bound book that we don’t seem eager to let go of.”

The reason his essay is spreading like wildfire on the web? So many of us are in deep agreement – and deeply relieved.

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