Books, Ebooks, and Reality

As I write this I am surrounded by lots of books—paper books with ink intelligibly spilled all over them. They have different covers: some are wearing jackets, some are fabric, others cardboard or paper. Many show me their white spines, others green, some grey, a few purple. They all take up space, and I own them.

I also own, in some sort of fashion, a collection of digital files. Where are they? Are they on my Kindle or computer, or sitting on an Amazon server someplace? They have covers of a sort, but the covers quickly disappear to make room for the next one.

Ebooks are less real, if they can be, in many senses. If an ebook isn't on my Kindle home screen, I easily forget that I have it, forget that I didn't finish it. It evaporates into the digital background. However, ebooks have illustrated a reality of reading that my "real" books actual obscure.

Unless you are reading them ebooks don't mean anything, they barely exist. And more than reading it, an ebook becomes a living and palpable object only once you have absorbed, digested, and discussed it's ideas.

What struck me the other day was how true this is, or aught to be, for all books. While they may look pretty on the shelf, and (unfortunately) make me feel more intelligent, I will never gain wisdom from an unused book.

So I see from my Ebook collection that the important part of a book is its ideas. It is the life of these ideas in the intellectual and spiritual man that make a book worth reading. The shape of my life, not the look of my library, determines the value of books. It aught not be otherwise.