Book-Love

Marie Bashkiryseff – At a Book

Now, as sales of dedicated e-readers dwindle, ... it’s hard to imagine how we allowed ourselves to get so worked up. But e-readers did teach us something: in their patent inadequacy – in all their slow-loading, thumb-cracking, percentage-bar clunkiness – they showed us how perfect a literary medium the book is. It’s a paradoxical time, one in which the oft-announced death of the book coincides with a new fever of bibliophilia. Book-love is certainly evident in every corner of this volume, and Vincent Giroud’s words are representative: “Holding a book is a pleasure I am not prepared to give up, much in the same way I would not be tempted to ingest my food in the form of tablets.” Clever pun, that. (Adam Hammond, "Books aren't going anywhere--despite the threat of robot sonneteers," The Globe and Mail, 2013-12-21)

Giroud's words come from his essay "A World without Books?" in The Edge of the Precipice: Why Read Literature in the Digital Age? edited by Paul Socken, of which this article is a review.