I was an early adopter of ebooks, in part because of my terrible eyesight, but mostly because I happened to break into reviewing just before the 2001 anthrax attacks. Fear of contaminated packages increased shipping time for cases of manuscripts from four days to forty. Electronic books (which in those long-ago days were really just doc files) provided instant gratification.
At one point I even considered ditching paper entirely in favour of electronic formats. In addition to the instant gratification angle, one does not have to worry about ebooks overloading the floors of one’s residence. One can carry a few thousand ebooks in one’s pocket. One can—and for me, this is the killer app—adjust font size. Ebooks are great and I would defend them to your last breath.
That said, an unexpected side effect of having produced James Nicoll Reviews for eight-plus years and almost 2300 reviews, as well as a recent foray back into roleplaying game texts, has been rediscovering my love of paper books. There are a number reasons why this is so. Let’s look at my reasons, starting with mere personal tastes before proceeding to reasons that may be more universal.
Books are, as artifacts, more pleasing to my eye than ebooks. This may come down to the happenstance that my preferred e-reader can’t handle colour. That impacts cover art. Book covers are conceived in colour. Some covers may function just as well in black and white but many, perhaps most, do not.
I find the experience of reading paper intrinsically more pleasant than ebooks. Ebooks do not provide the heft of a book, the sensation of holding the book open, or even the smell of paper, whether the wonderful aroma of a new book or that of a well-aged volume. Also, I enjoy knowing by touch just how much remains of a book.
PDFs are a particularly vexing format, especially for roleplaying game manuals with multiple columns. I can either have everything on screen and too small to read or large enough to read at the cost of having to scroll up and down over and over. I took to reading old and new RPG manuals during the pandemic (nothing says “revisit something dependent on social interaction” like a calamity in which social interaction could result in the most dire consequences), which really drove home the visceral unpleasantness of PDF RPG manuals. Physical RPG manuals are a superior experience in almost every way.
Paper books facilitate object permanence more effectively than do ebooks. Even given coping mechanisms like Calibre or LibraryThing, it is easy to forget that one has acquired a particular book. Scanning a shelf provides a bounty of reminders. Additionally, perusing bookshelves appears to be a more effective source of serendipity, discovering works relevant to one’s interest while looking for others. (Note: Molly Templeton covers some of this and more in her recent essay “The Case for Touching All Your Books.”)
While you do need a source of illumination in order to read paper books, the books themselves do not run out of power. I particularly appreciated this during a 2011 trip when my Kobo ran out of power days before I was due to go home. Since I’d optimistically left the power cord at home, there I was, trapped in the tropical splendors of Hawai‘i, with no books to read. Calamity! Had I prudently packed a few paperbacks, I need never have looked up from my books. Scenery, bah!
Paper books are durable along several axes. I have run across files only decades old whose archaic file formats are no longer readable by any machine I now own. Even before that, I lost files on floppy disks as the disks themselves degraded. Many of my paperbacks are approaching their first half century or only dimly remember it. I have hardcover books that are more than a century old. I have no problem reading them, provided only that I hold them close enough to my eye.
(There is a survivorship bias there, which I call “the reason why so few of the old books I review are in Lancer editions.”)
Finally, there are many books I might want to read that do not exist in electronic editions. Every time a new medium is introduced, older works pass through a filter shaped in part by whether people want to convert existing works to the new format and in part by institutional barriers to doing so. There are many worthy books one might want to read that are unavailable in ebook format. Even if they are out of print in paper—even if they only had a single print run long, long ago—paper’s durability means I might very well encounter a copy provided only that I search diligently enough in used bookstores (online and in meatspace).
Again, I am big fan of ebooks (Satan’s chosen format, PDF, aside), and I also recognize that many readers may default to electronic formats over physical books for reasons other than mere preference (lack of space, for example, or health issues which make handling or reading paper books difficult); I know that my experiences and personal predilections do not apply across the board. But for me, there are things paper simply does better than ebooks do, which is why there will always be a place for physical books in my library.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
