Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

random and looked through them. Here’s a catalog of interesting bits of stuff I found trapped between the pages:
    • A W-2 tax and wage statement from my first job.
    • A note from my best friend, torn from a wall calendar dated June 26, 1993, with a note saying, “Jason, come visit!”
    • A Calvin and Hobbes cartoon my dad mailed me when I was in college.
    • Petals from a pear tree I once had outside my apartment in Ohio.
    • A record for a Dungeons & Dragons character I once had in junior high (magician, level ten).
    • A fax I received on the day my grandfather died.
    • Three Chinese coins my mother once gave me.
    • A love letter from a former girlfriend.
    • A butterfly wing, either carefully preserved or accidentally torn.
    The catalog could go on and on. Anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that I’m a collector of useless and sentimental things. My wallet bulges not with cash but with receipts and ticket stubs that I’m too sentimental to toss aside. The result is that my wallet grows larger every month and needs to be held together by too many rubber bands. It won’t even fit into my pocket anymore, which kind of defeats the purpose.
    I have a habit of stuffing receipts and letters into anything I can find, books not excepted. I leave these trinket collections and stashes of papers behind as bits of myself from former eras. I stuff them into desk drawers and cardboard boxes and wallets and, best of all, books, because there are so many of them in my house. It’s as if I’m able to animate the books with my personality, somehow. Maybe I’m a bit pathological in this sense, compared to most people. But books are like waystations in my life, not just in terms of what they taught me, but what they in turn recollect of me, what bits of myself they hold between their pages. There’s a capsule history of my life preserved between the pages of my books.
    It’s a surprising find, and I’d venture to say that everyone with enough books has something similar pressed between the pages of their own books. Such capsule histories comprised of love letters and faded faxes can only be contained by our print books and not by digital ones. Books that I’ve stuffed with flyers and pamphlets and notes I’ve jotted on postcards serve as time capsules. They’re part of my identity. My identity is not—and hopefully never will be—emotionally aligned with a clean, sleek, soulless plastic device.
    In this sense, ebooks are useless.
    But now that I’m moving away from print books and toward ebooks, perhaps this is a blessing in disguise. I can reassess whether I even need to store my personal trinkets, my bits of stuff. Maybe it would be best if I simply bought a digital scanner and scanned them. That way, they could coexist with my ebooks on my hard drive and follow me forever, a digital shrine to three Chinese coins and a torn butterfly wing.
    But I suspect that something will get lost in translation if these trinkets move from physical to digital. We’ll lose the feeling of unexpected discovery. We’ll also lose context. Why, for example, was a certain love letter placed inside a specific book? We’ll lose something of the ineffable mystery of our lives. But what do you think? I’d like to hear what you have found preserved between the pages of your family’s books.
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/7.html

Why Books (and Ebooks) Can Never Be Replaced
    Why do we read? Besides the nagging voice of my second-grade teacher in my ears, what compels me to read?
    In its way, reading is highly ambiguous. What, for example, is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness “about”? There are many possible interpretations, but none are definitive. Reading is open-ended, plural, meandering, and imprecise, which can be maddening. So what’s the allure of reading?
    In part there’s the status. Reading is a way to emulate the elite of former ages. The elite members of society—not the commoners—were the readers, and they were the ones with power. Not surprisingly, people wanted to emulate them. And in spite of its inherent ambiguity, reading still has an allure because it works. Reading is still the preeminent mode of consuming information in our culture. It’s time-efficient and much faster than conversation. Reading is often solitary and free of distraction—unlike talking or watching a TV show, where a soundtrack and audio effects intentionally manipulate your mood and break any concentration you may