New York Times Debates the Need for Books

I was reading the Times blog "Do School Libraries Need Books?" and, as a bibliophile and school librarian, I pulled out a couple of the quotes that jumped out at me, and the emphasis within the quotes are mine.  The first is from Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, professor of English at the University of Maryland:

Do schools need libraries and do students need books? Of course they do. There are the predictable brickbats: Not everything is digitized yet, nor soon will be. A screen is less conducive to deep concentration than the stillness of the page. Bits are brittle.

I am among those who believe that in time, and maybe soon, these arguments will seem less damning than they do now. But I’m also aware of how deeply books, and metaphors of books, have penetrated our design of digital documents and digital reading — whether we’re talking about Alan Kay’s vision of a “DynaBook” in the early 1970s, a Web “page” (with its scroll bar), or the latest tablet device to hit the market.

Books and libraries are working (or living) models of knowledge formation. We need them for the same reason we need models of atoms and airplanes. They are hands-on. They are immersive. Holding a book in our hands, we orient ourselves within a larger system.

Walking the stacks, following a footnote or checking out what’s on the shelf above P96.T42K567 2007 is a bit like getting a glimpse at the ducts and plumbing behind the drywall. Or the Web site’s source code.

The second quote is from William Powers, author of Hamlet's Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. Again, the emphasis in the quote is mine:

The idea that books are outdated is based on a common misconception: the belief that new technologies automatically render existing ones obsolete, as the automobile did with the buggy whip. However, this isn’t always the case. Old technologies often handily survive the introduction of new ones, and sometimes become useful in entirely new ways.

Seventy years ago, many believed the advent of television spelled the end of radio. Wrong. Likewise, the automobile didn’t kill off the passenger train. On this crowded, environmentally troubled planet, it turns out pulling up all those old rail lines was short-sighted and dumb.

So it goes with books. What are often considered the weaknesses of the old-fashioned book are in some ways its strengths. For instance, a physical book works with the body and mind in ways that more readily produce the deep-dive experience that is reading at its best. When you read on a two-dimensional screen, your mind spends a lot of energy just navigating, keeping track of where you are on the page and in the text. The tangibility of a traditional book allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden: you feel where you are, and this frees up the mind to think.

Moreover, I believe that in a hyper-connected age, the fact that books are not connected to the electronic grid is becoming their greatest asset. They’re a space apart, a private place away from the inbox where we can go to quiet our minds and reflect. Isn’t that the state in which the best kind of learning occurs?

The comments of all five contributers can be read here: http://tinyurl.com/35jmyev