Why I Will Still Buy Books

Currently reading: Behemoth (by Scott Westerfeld), The Weird Sisters (by Eleanor Brown), Chosen (by Ted Dekker), and The Amazing Spider-man: Matters of Life & Death. Yes, that last one is a graphic novel. Go web.

This week, I can't get my mind off eBooks. But more than that, I can't stop thinking about what can be lost if we do not stop to see what we have. (Cue melancholic music, images of burning parchments, and weeping children.)
Now, before you drop your forehead onto an unforgiving surface, groaning about the gripers who can't face the inevitable music of technology, please give me a moment. Just one moment.

You are all entitled to your opinion on the subject of print versus digital, the improving/degrading quality of literature, the state of publishing today, etc. etc. ETC. My opinions are neither economical, nor are they even artistic. I don't believe that eBooks are somehow destroying the book industry - they are merely changing it. I don't believe that just because we now have a saturation of self-published books we will not be able to find the good books among them. (Heaven forbid, are we this un-adventurous? This lazy?) The fact is this - the good ones always rise if the author is business savvy and the reader is persistent.
No, my argument with digital - or rather, my advocacy for print - is based on a much simpler, and possibly less noble rant.

The necessity to feel.

The movement towards Kindles, iPhones, tablets, and other touch technology is astounding and interesting and convenient, but it is marked by two major defining motions.
The Slide and The Tap. That's it. That's all. (If you have not read "A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design," you must. Trust me, it's not overly science-y. It's a fabulous read.)

Maybe some of you don't mind this meager imitation of the real world. That's fine. But many of us do mind. I, for one, fear the "use it or lose it" principle. If a fish is left in an ink-black cavern pool, it does not need its eyes and so its evolution takes the natural turn towards blindness.

 So if we do not use our ability to feel...if we limit our stimuli to only what we can see...if we cease to need the intensity and variety of touch...what will that mean for our evolution?

Will our hands, at some point, realize their own hunger to grip, to balance? Will our brains long for the sensations that "pictures under glass" cannot give us?
Or will we sleep as our most taken-for-granted sense slowly dulls? Until we lose...

...the weave of paper between our fingers...

...the weight of a Bible...
...the wash of a leather-bound Harvard classic.
Do as you will, think as you wish. But this is my reason for budgeting books - real books - into my world.