For many the ownership of dead trees is a quaint antiquated idea. Who wants to clutter up their life and freedom with physical copies of books that are expensive to move? Your digital reading device can carry all the same books with the same words and sit in your hand…isn’t that better?

Sure there are some advantages, but there are many disadvantages as well.

Resistance to Corporate Capitalism

Owning something physical is resistance to corporate greed and capitalism1. Your digital copy of a book is not something you own in the same way you own a physical book. You can’t give away your digital copy because you’re done with it. You can’t pass down your library of Kindle books to your children2. You can’t sell it again, you don’t in fact own it.

Purchasing a digital copy of a book for your Kindle merely grants you the right to display the text of that book on your device, until Amazon decides to change the terms and then you don’t have the right to display it anymore. In that way, Amazon is like Darth Vader…pray they don’t alter the terms of the agreement further.

On the political front, digital goods with granted licenses are great for politicians that want to regulate ideas. Simply pass a law that certain books aren’t allowed and then get corporations to remove them from devices3. There is no central tracking of the books in my library, and someone would have to come to my house and physically remove books from my library. Add all the libraries in town, and this problem is huge which means ideas are far more likely to survive and thrive in a physical world than a digital one.

Resistance to Distraction

Reading physical books is also an act of resistance to distraction4. Especially reading on something like an iPad, you’re always one swipe away from some novelty. Even on a Kindle, you can stop and flip to the Kindle store to see if there is anything to purchase or if there are any deals.

While you can always grab your phone and do this, a physical book can only do one thing…present words to you in the order that the writer felt accomplished something. Most of the time sucks on your phone have an army of engineers and scientists behind them making sure that they’re maximally engaging so that you spend your time on them. They are designed to suck you in and distract you from the life around you for as long as possible.

Yes a good book can also suck you in, but there is a definite end to a book. A point where you’ve read all the words and have to put the book down. There is no infinite scrolling, or carefully designed algorithms that want to keep you focused on them as long as possible.

Resistance to Fake News

Another insidious thing that digital works do, especially searching, is get us to easily focus on a snippet of text instead of taking in the whole work and understanding the context of it5. Search engines bring us snippets of text that seem to be the answer to our query so we can walk away thinking that we understand the subject at hand.

The Death of Expertise talked about a study where people felt they fully understood a subject by simply searching for it and skimming the headlines and short summaries presented by a search engine6. A person that merely searches will feel they have the same amount of understanding as someone that has read a number of books on the subject. This is the Dunning-Kruger Effect at work, you feel you have more expertise at the beginning of your knowledge journey than you do. As you become more experienced you realize how little you know and downgrade your expertise.

Books force us to focus on an argument and see it through. Reading well helps us understand where someone is coming from and dig into their arguments.

Physical books help this most because of their lack of distraction from outside sources that can help us lose the thread we’re trying to follow.

But You Need to Do More than Just Read

Reading alone isn’t enough resistance though, you must internalize that which you read7. We currently see governments banning books because they’re afraid that their children will read books that challenge the beliefs of the parents and then…hold different beliefs than their parents do8. Parents are afraid that their kids will think they’re wrong and abandon the beliefs that are held dear at home.

Society needs more active resistance. It needs more people reading widely and standing up for others that have a hard time standing up for themselves.

Further Reading

  • The Lost Art of Reading Page 125 ↩

  • Though they may not want all your physical books anyway because they can’t afford the space to store them ↩

  • We saw this with the removal of 1984 from Kindles ↩

  • The Lost Art of Reading Page 149 ↩

  • The Shallows Loc 1507 ↩

  • The Death of Expertise Page 119 ↩

  • The Shallows LOC 929 ↩

  • I regularly tell my kids that they’ll look back and see lots of things I said and wonder how on earth I thought that. ↩