In this ever more digital age, it’s a compelling question.

Google is making a massive effort to digitize library collections from around the world, bringing millions of tomes into the collective ether that is the internet.

But are they still books once they’ve been coded into ones and zeros?

Virginia Heffernan addressed the question from another angle in her wonderful blog, The Medium, in the Sunday New York Times. The question was first offered to her by her young son after he’d completed reading something online and was asked by the computer, “Did you like this book?” He balked and refused to answer the question, insisting that what he’d just read — definition of the publisher aside — was not a book.

Heffernan goes on to agree, even though she’s an admitted devotee of both Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader and her Blackberry. Both may present text, but neither offers the same experience.

Don’t believe it? Take a tour around the web. Look at how some of the most hard-wired digiterati are using blogs, Tweets and other electronic signals to promote something printed on paper and bound into what we all think of as a book.

Is Google’s library going to be an impressive achievement? Absolutely. Is it going to be filled with information? More than any one person could ever see. But it won’t have a single book in it.

Will a Kindle ever offer the sensory intimacy of words on paper? Even if the new Kindle can somehow send out a little puff of new paperback smell (Go ahead, pick up a pocket paperback off your shelf and crack it open. Evocative, no?). Even if you could drop it in the sand without panic and even if they installed a little device that would whip out and give you a nasty paper cut once in a blue moon, it still would not be a book.

— Jonathan

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Content, Editorial, News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.