Books: Unlike Any Other
2025-04-02
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Printed books are fascinating to me. They occupy a place in societal conscience that no other medium can, at least reliably.
Books are one of the few forms of storytelling at all, and probably the only long-form medium, that use no energy on the part of the teller. To read a book, one doesn't need an Internet connection, an up-to-date operating system, or indeed any electricity at all. A television or music player uses energy for each play of a TV show or song. Not so for a book: one does not need to print a book twice to read it twice. Once a book is bound and placed on the shelf, it can convey the knowledge within as many times as the reader wishes. Its only limitation is the physical integrity of the book.
A book is passive, but our engagement with it is anything but. It holds its tales quietly on the page, while the mind of the reader brings the words therein to life. Reading, being a language-based medium, engages an analytical part of the brain that our senses don't naturally reach. We develop neural connections between disparate parts of the mind--emotion and reason, feeling and thought, experience and abstraction--by reading books.
The beauty of a book is that its information is immediately accessible as-is. No arbiter controls the interaction between you and a book. Only your ability to comprehend the written word will dictate what you get out of it--and the book itself might expand your comprehension. Computer files are, in a physical sense, an arrangement of magnetic particles or floating gates on a chip. But without a computer to decode those arrangements, they are completely inaccessible to humans. Radio waves and television signals fare no better.
A printed book exists independently of any infrastructure. This is what makes it resistant to censorship. The writers might be censored; the publishers might be censored; then distributors might be censored. These are all parts of the creation of a book. But once a book reaches the reader, no-one can change the words out from underneath him.
The stability of a book also prevents unintentional alteration. Oral traditions mutate over time, subject to the imperfections of Chinese whispers. Music changes its melody. Links rot and computer drives fail. And human memory, in its curious mix of heartstrings and happenings, may be the least reliable of all. Books stand the test of time: a document written with a quill three hundred years ago said the same thing then that it says today.
Many forms of communication have come and gone over the centuries. Books still stubbornly hang on. And I think they will forever. Books are an experience unlike any other. And I know I don't get the same satisfaction from any other form of content as I do from a book.
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[Last updated: 2025-04-02]