Precious objects and holy spaces

But when all is said and done, holding a printed book in my hands can be a sacred experience -- the weight of the paper, the windy sound of pages turning, like a breeze. To me, a printed book is like a cathedral or a library or a beach -- a holy space.

Anne Lamott, By the Book, edited by Pamela Paul

Anne Lamott

In the same book, E.L. Doctorow refers to paper books as "precious objects." Doctorow and Anne Lamott are authors, so of course they love books, yet clearly this feeling that books are holy spaces or precious objects goes far beyond those whose livelihoods depend on them.

A recent post on Jane Friedman's blog, (janefriedman.com) reports that sales of paper books went up again during the first half of 2017, 2.6 percent over the same period in 2016. Meanwhile ebooks have "lost about $1 billion of their value as a format for traditional publishers since 2013." Since that year ebook sales have been in decline, even though many of us during that same period have been fearing that traditional books will disappear from the scene, obsolete in an age when virtually everyone carries an electronic object in their hands capable of downloading almost any book anyone might want to read.

E.L. Doctorow

Also in By the Book, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, confesses she prefers paper books to ebooks, even though her career is in the tech industry. "I travel with an iPad, but at home I like holding a book open and being able to leaf through it, highlight with a real yellow pen, and dog-ear important pages," she says. Thus it is the sensory experience of holding a paper book, as well as the almost mystical experience that Lamott and Doctorow speak about, that keeps people buying books they can hold in their hands, when ebooks offer convenience and economy.

All this suggests that books, the old fashioned kind, will be around for awhile yet.