Two weeks ago I touched on the idea of time and vacations. I wrote about finding a good book and plopping my derriere on the couch for an entire day. While I wrote about the mind and its engagement with the book, I centered my essay on the mind’s ability to focus on the moment. Here is where I’d like to discuss the importance of a good, run-of-the-mill, made-of-paper book.
Electronic books today may not be as engaging as the typical paper book. The newest of these devices comes with internet connection. This means we can read a book, surf the internet, and check our email all on the same device. This opportunity to become distracted often leads to temptation. It is not difficult for temptation to slip in between chapters three and four. Let me see if I have any email!
Granted, distraction can come from a host of other factors: television, telephones, construction, the prurient screams from the upstairs neighbors. It can pull one’s attention away from a book just as well as the chime from a new email.
Yet aside from all these disturbances of diversion, a good run-of-the-mill book engages the mind of the reader. It teleports the brain into a place where the imagination is able to create and destroy. It builds new connections between the brain’s synapses. It holds our attention in a way that most media (movies, video games, radio) cannot, and it does so with simplicity. Its receiver, its input, its ethernet jack is the human brain. It is passive until it becomes activated by the brain. Because it can’t be turned on then ignored, or paused to read the internet, the book forces the brain to think and to comprehend.
Our active brains lend themselves to our tactile needs. We love to touch and be touched. We need this interaction between each another as much as we need it between the objects that surround us. Both electronic and paper books provide this basic need, but the paper book provides more. Its pages, its folds, creases, and dimples are constantly within our touch. Paper differs between books. Covers differ between books. Size and shape differ between books. None of these differences are experienced with the e-book.
There is also one very important thing that makes the paper book more important than the e-book: you don’t have to worry about the battery life.
