This is a letter to the editor I published at the Daily Advance. Posted here for posterity, since they have no online archive:
Robert Kelly-Goss’ recent column, where he argues the superiority of printed texts over their electronic counterparts, reminded me of a quote from author Douglas Adams: “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.”
When I discovered all public domain literary works were online, I gleefully donated more than half my book collection to the library. Why lug 50-pound boxes of tree-killing, carbon-contributing, energy-wasting obsolete stacks of evenly-cut and bounded paper around with me? Now I access most books on my cell phone.
Because bookstores are limited by shelf space, they only sell those lowest-common-denominator books published for mass-consumption. I can’t link to a printed book online, I have to cite it. Then people who want to go to my primary source must call their library, who calls another library to have it delivered after whoever’s currently reading it turns it back in.
Compare this to the instant gratification of opening a book online, where there are enough copies for everyone in the world, where even children living in third-world countries are currently accessing them thanks to computers the first-world donated, and where we can access a variety of books that dwarf the meager selection publishers permit us access to.
Thomas Jefferson said that the nature of ideas means that we can share an idea with someone else, and the sharing does not lessen our knowing it. Information Age technologies are making this principle a reality not just in our minds, but in our media as well.
RYAN SOMMA
Elizabeth City