The feel of things

Don’t you love how things feel? How well-made things feel especially. How about the smell? I’ve always loved the smell of old books. I love book covers and how they’re supposed to convey something meaningful about a book composed of hundreds of thousands of words. I love good bookshops and libraries, the way you feel when you walk their aisles looking for treasure and sometimes managing to find it. Some of my favourite memories are searching used bookshops for something to read. I was a voracious reader in my youth, devouring everything and anything I could get my hands on. It’s how I survived my teenage years, those precious hours spent in the library transported me away from my troubles, it was magic.

I miss books, I miss their weight, the sound a page makes as your turn it, the way that books start to yellow with age, the cracking of the binding as you open it up fully. I miss adding them to my bookshelves and feeling a sense of accomplishment and shared history.

Now I’m not someone who is distrustful of new technologies, I’m immersed in it. I’ve had some sort of tech in my life since I was a child and I make my living from it. These days I read all my books on an iPad and I love the ability to carry many books with me. I also love that I can buy books whenever it takes my fancy and start reading that book straightaway. So of course there is much to love about the new way of reading a book. But I feel as if I’ve lost something as well. I feel more removed from the source material. Books seem more disposable then ever. It seems to take less effort to abandon something difficult. Is the book, as in the actual physical presence of it part of the experience of the read or is it just the words?

To make myself feel less troubled by these questions I think of the following. Less trees will be cut down because of new technologies, so making physical books obsolete is a good thing. As someone who cares about the environment I feel less guilty about purchasing a digital book from iTunes than a physical one from a bookstore, not that iPads don’t have their own environmental concerns. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, getting old and feeling the world changing in unfamiliar and unsettling ways that makes me feel this way. I might just need to get used to it. Still it might seem irrational but it’s hard to shake the feeling that something has been lost, as if some of the magic is gone.