Break Your Children Off of Books Today

When I had to learn SQABasic for automated testing, I downloaded and printed out the 902 page reference guide, three-hole punched it, and put it into a three-ring binder. The only nice thing about this otherwise idiotic and wasteful act of mine was that I printed it two-up and double-sided to conserve paper.

Now I’m in the process of migrating into Database Development. Having to learn the intricacies of our relational database, I downloaded the Ingres 2006 SQL Reference Guide. It’s a PDF file, and it’s taking every ounce of my willpower now not to print it out.

In the comments section of his July, 2007 article, A Defense of the Book, Alan Wall argues:

I value computer technology, and could not function without it (here I am, after all) but I am yet to meet anyone who would rather read Paradise Lost on a computer screen, or read Dickens on a train from a laptop.

He’s correct that there is a strong resistance to people reading entire books electronically, but this is not proof that print-books are intrinsically superior to e-books. The resistance has much more to do with what’s familiar to us. Print books are incredibly inefficient and devoid of features when compared to the same literature placed in an electronic medium.

There’s no “Find” function in a book. I can’t cut-and-paste my favorite quotes and blockquotes into other files, I have to transcribe them by hand or scan them with text-reading software. I can’t store a book online and reference it from any computer in the world, including my cell-phone.

If I cite a book in one of my posts, anyone who wants to check my sources has to call the library or check the book’s availability online. Then, if the library doesn’t have the book, they call another library and have it sent over. At some point, the scholar has to physically visit the library to pick up the book, and then physically visit the library again to return it.

In a utopian future, libraries will offer nothing but free Internet access and experts to guide people to books online. Romanticists get cold-chills at such a future, as if we are somehow losing something classical rather than gaining something magical. It’s the same nostalgia that keeps us from adopting the Metric System and Dvorak Keyboard layouts.

We didn’t have E-books when I was a kid, so now I must unlearn my habits and port my mind to this Information Age paradigm. Don’t let your personal resistance to E-books prompt you to saddle your children with the obsolescence of printed texts. Get them reading books online today, and put the world’s library on their bookshelf.

Project Gutenberg is a great place to start, with a collection of over 25,000 classic text available for free online.