Is there still any point collecting books?
"Books breathe as trees breathe. When all the books have gone our mental
climate will have changed. It's a question whether we'll survive.
Technology cannot replace a book. No matter that I can quickly find a
digital version of a novel I'm looking for, I still fly into a rage when
I discover I no longer have it, and remember who borrowed and didn't
return it, five, 10, 20 years ago. For it is irreplaceable. It has my
scribblings in it. The marginal expletives. The turned-down pages. The
bus ticket or taxi receipt or even billet doux employed as a bookmark -
not just the marginalia of an intellectual life but the detritus of the
heart. And that you don't get on a Kindle, or a free e-book courtesy of
Project Gutenberg. What you can't bend or throw or write on isn't, in
the end, literature."
Howard Jacobson. More at BBC
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