Why do books still exist?

AC de Fombelle
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

It’s useful sometimes to take a step back and look at what you’re working on.

A while back, StreetLib tribe met for a day of thinking about one topic: what will be books in 15 years. Our entire company is built around one concept: books. Spending time on this question was therefore sensible to state on the future of StreetLib (both the English and French definitions of “sensible” work in this sentence). Our day long brainstorming lead to a bunch of questions and hypothesis you can read about in a blog post I then wrote. We concluded that, whatever they become, books will exist forever as long as people have stories to tell and things to say.

Well, I’m calling a bluff. Yes, people will always have things to say, stories to tell, theories to demonstrate, and concepts to explain but aren’t there multiple other — more in line with our modern times — ways to tell stories?
Movies, podcasts, web conferences, Youtube guides, blogs, TV shows, the list can go on for miles. So, really, why do books still exist?

They are a media of a generation before all electricity was invented, yet after years of solutions of substitution, we still write and read books. The cultural shift, one could argue, takes time, and generations educated with books are still there and passing on their habits to the next generation. Except we observe young adults and children, who are the most likely to adapt definitely to a new media, to be among the largest consumer of books.

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

I don’t have a real answer to this question. My goal is more to stimulate your thoughts on this. (By the way, I’d love to read your take on the comments below.) Here is, however, my hypothesis:

Books, written words (I’m here excluding audiobooks), don’t show us or make us listen to a story.

A book stimulates our imagination as no other media can.

Words only tell us so much. A description can be analysed a thousand different ways. That’s why most people are disappointed when seeing a movie adaptation of a book they loved. Books have the ability to send us to new worlds, to unravel unknown theories, to educate us, while letting us build the world and visualize the theory as we want them to be.

A book is a very limited media in terms of sensorial invocation. The flipside is that it requires our brain to fabricate all those sensations. This is the one thing we’ll find only in books.

Getting our brain stimulated on a topic of our choosing is something we crave for. I’ll add that getting to choose what things look like, sound like, feel like or smell like is a protection. We aren’t forced to see, hear, smell or feel anything. Distanciation is easier when less senses are involved.
Books let us free to see things as we want them to be, hear them the way we like and avoid to smell them like they might in real life.

Hence the existence of books, even today, and even tomorrow.

Photo by Aris Sfakianakis on Unsplash

StreetLib

The global gateway distributor of digital and paper books for the 21st century.

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AC de Fombelle

Written by

StreetLib

StreetLib

The global gateway distributor of digital and paper books for the 21st century.

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