Books vs ebooks newsweek

After a half century of neglect, the lowly single is back on top. Most immediately this has repercussions for artists, maybe not so much for the people who buy their music. But who knows? With books, the absence of packaging does nothing to the contents. I can buy a hardcover copy of Moby-Dick or download it onto an e-reader, and Melville is still Melville. It's hard to think of the book without them.

I can do that, certainly, but some little thing is lost. Paperbacks and public libraries made books cheap or free but certainly available to millions who might otherwise not have been able to afford them, and all that happened long before I was born. Nevertheless, I was brought up by people who had been taught—and who taught me—that books were valuable things, things to be cared for and cherished, and I have owned some volumes for close to half a century almost none of them, I should point out, qualify as "collectible" or valuable to an antiquarian book collector; owning a rare book makes me nervous.

I like books I can hold, read, and even—here my mother is spinning in her grave—write in. I come from a generation for whom the books and records on the shelf signaled, in some way, who you were starting with the fact that you were a person who owned books or records or CDs. If you visited a friend, you took the first chance you had to surreptitiously scan that friend's shelves to get a handle on the person.

I suppose I could sneak a peek at a friend's Kindle, but is that the same? And try that kind of snooping on a bus or in a coffee shop and you'll probably get arrested.

For a sense of the diminution of this sort of information gathering, click through this Tumblr of covers scroll until you get to the e-reader included in the mix, to fully plumb the difference. The stuff of our lives is a comfort.

We look up at the shelves and we see old friends. The other one is the likelihood of advertising. In South Africa, TV programs are interrupted every 10 minutes by as many as six to eight ads, yet we still have to pay license fees.

Anything connected to electronic media like the Internet eventually ends up like this. Ian Shaw Johannesburg, South Africa. I am 19 and a product of the digital age: I have gone through seven computers, four cell phones, two digital cameras, a Walkman, a Discman and an iPod.

But I refuse to see a book digitized. Amazon's Jeff Bezos is wrong in assuming that we fanatical readers love only the words and ideas; reading a book is an entire process. Pointing and clicking will never hold the same satisfaction as browsing the shelves at a library or bookstore, nor will the Kindle be able to capture the feeling you get as the pages dwindle and you don't know whether to hurry up to find out how it ends or slow down and savor every word.

Beth Papworth Westerville, Ohio. To create a parallel to the divine book is akin to asking people to wear plastic attire—technically improved to control temperature, change colors et al. Amazon's Kindle might succeed in subsuming one's consciousness as a book does, but it robs you of the feel of a book, the smell of paper and ink, and you cannot treasure your gems on your bookshelves.

You will simply not be able to go down memory lane looking at your beloved collection. Chidanand Kumar Bangalore, India. E-books would not be appropriate for one large category of books: publications in which quality illustrations are important. How would a book about Frank Lloyd Wright or Michelangelo show up on the small-format handheld?

To accommodate my field, the history of art, and many others where illustrations are essential, e-books would have to be too large to be practical. James K.

Jeff Bezos can say all he wants about books' being "the last bastion of analog," but there is nothing like the feel and smell of a book, whether old or new, in my hands. Long live the megabookstores and the corner bookshop. Deane Bridgetown, Barbados. For this writer, the day I start composing with the "community" as my editors, "wiki style" or otherwise, is the day you can shoot me.

Steven Levy's article on digital books is provocative, but surely he must realize just how tenacious writers are about using their own—and no one else's—material. It may be harder to publish serious literature these days, readership may be decreasing and the world may be going digital, but there's still that driving pride of sole authorship and, yes, seeing the original on honest-to-God paper pages.

Steven Schwartz Ft. Collins, Colorado. Would I take a kindle to the bathtub to read? I'll stick with durable, dependable, no-battery books. Michael G. Driver Ichihara City, Japan. Amazon's Kindle may be a great gadget, but the book has a shelf life yet.

For starters, the Kindle can't open. One principal reason that the codex or book superseded the scroll in late antiquity was its ability to combine text and image, an important source of edification as well as entertainment. The Kindle can exhibit only one page at a time—a giant step backward! As for books, my bookshelves hold 10, some even purchased from Amazon. My flame is one that the Kindle won't light.

Jeffrey F. It has become one of the most paradoxical questions of modern times: are books dead on paper? Or are they simply becoming much more accessible to the masses since they are also now in digital form? Gallup reported that the reasons behind the overall decline of books read, and whether the coronavirus pandemic played a part, was "unclear.

Across most demographics included in the poll, Americans are reading fewer books, Gallup found, but the biggest drop was among college graduates. Those who graduated from a college or a university read roughly six fewer books last year than they did in and Nearly half of college graduates read more than 10 books in a year between and , but last year just 35 percent of alums read that many books.

Gallup previously reported the number of Americans who listed reading as their favorite way to spend an evening dropped significantly. In , 12 percent of adults listed it as their preferred pastime compared with just 6 percent in Still, the publishing industry reported sales in remained on track with the previous five years despite the onset of the global health crisis.