Why Books?

If you are not a reader of books, you may well be bored by this essay.

By “books” I mean those objects made from paper, bound hard-back or soft-back, full of words, very few pictures. The sort you can still find in most pubic libraries and a declining number of brick-and-mortar second-hand bookshops in little red-brick towns. Books are those things you can never get enough of.

A book is what you take with you when you go on a trip, whether it be a two-week stay on the beach in Malaporosa or a fifty-minute trip downtown on public transit.

For at least twenty years I have been fascinated by my choice of a hard-copy paper book over an eBook or an audio-book, and now I have an answer that satisfies me.

I have discussed this with fellow book-lovers. We have used eBooks, either on eBook readers or as PDF files on our laptop or smart phone; we have listened to audio-books through ear-buds while out walking, or to let us drift off to sleep at night. We read fiction and non-fiction.

But we all prefer hard-copy books.

Why this preference? Humans did not evolve to read and write. We are sent to school to learn how to read and write. Reading and Writing are visual and manipulative skills. Not so listening and speaking. Listening and speaking we do pretty well from birth, from a baby’s babbling, through “His First Word!” (“Da”, Doh!) and on to peaks of oratory.

Why is using our eyes to read a hard-copy book preferable to streaming the story in through our ears, a natural act, with our eyes closed, another natural act?

I am driven to read books, to surround myself with books. Twenty years ago when I moved into a spacious apartment, I used the carpet-layer’s van to load up twenty-eight “Billy” bookcases from Ikea and started assembling them. Unpacked my first carton of books from storage that night, too. That was my first batch of bookcases. My girlfriend exclaimed “But you don’t want to sleep in a LIBRARY!. She was wrong, and she is no longer my girlfriend, which might tell you something about my love of books.

For most of my past twenty years I have thought that speed of input was the reason for our preference for hard-copy books. The eye-brain can soak in data roughly five times faster than can the ear-brain, or at source, the brain-mouth-lips. If you want to know what time the train leaves for Midlum-cum-Wallop next Tuesday, a panel-sized printed table of departures is better than locating and listening to a ticket-clerk.

Try it. Time yourself reading the next paragraph with your eyes, then go back and time yourself speaking the paragraph aloud, clearly, so that another person can understand it.

Speed of input is important when we are desperate for data that we can process, less important when we are just burning up time. That might be why we will listen to an audio-book when we are on vacation or on the aeroplane that flies us to our destination. As a pastime, an audio-book helps us to pass the time. But knowing the chemical properties of Selenium is what I wanted to know ten seconds ago. Time is critical.

I am currently listening, for the second time, to the three-volume Autobiography of Mark Twain. I was listening to track twenty-one of disk eighteen of volume two. There are twenty-one CD disks in volume two and twenty-three tracks on disk eighteen. I count 1,550 MP3 tracks in that folder for Mark Twain. This is a hefty work.

On these tracks of disk 18, Mark Twain is telling the story of one of several examination of palmists and phrenologists. Various journals and Mark himself sent off prints of his palms and asked palmists to interpret the prints. Mark now reads back the reports and comments on them.

I am at the report of the third palmist. Mark reads the dozen or so items (“(1) This man is courteous; (2) this man is smart; (3) this man has principles” and so on), and then Mark goes back and comments on each line “Line one: This may be true; it is not for me to say”, by this time I have forgotten what the first line was about.

Now with a hard-copy book I would flip back to the previous page, locate the line “1”, re-read the palmist’s comment (and me being me, read the second one while I am at it because I know I will need that one too!), and then flip forward to the current page. I will repeat this procedure as Mark comments on each line of the third palmist’s report. If both the original comments and Mark’s comments lie on the same two open pages, I am in luck. There will be no need to use my relatively slow fingers, only my speed-of-light eyes.

We have all done that with our Chemistry text book or our John Grisham novel. The process is fast, even if we find ourselves thinking “Wasn’t that the guy who crashed the car early on? Probably chapter two or three?”. We flip and find the answer in seconds.

With an eBook this can be done, but only in a serial fashion, not by any form of binary-chop. With an e-book we must swipe our finger, one page at a time until we find the page with the text. And note that all too often it IS one page, not the two pages our eyes can scan with a hard-copy book.

With an audio-book things are much worse. Whereas a hard-copy or e-book can contain a table of contents and an index, no such luxury is affordable with an audio-book, and to the best of my knowledge there is no easy way of indexing, in the truest sense, an audio book.

With my ear buds firmly in place, how will I use my dulcet tones to interrogate an audio-book?

I am starting to think that it is the monotonic serial progression through an audio book that makes it so like a long train journey and less like a useful resource.

No wonder I love hard-copy books. They are so versatile.

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