At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious: I think the relationship a lot of people have with books can best be described as commodity fetisishm.
People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that
I stayed at an Airbnb that had fake books on the shelves! I looked them up and they aren't even especially cheap. But they probably get stolen a lot less.
I found out recently that you can just buy books. There's businesses who sell books. Not any specific book, but just books to fill shelves to decorate rooms. You can even buy colour coordinated books.
A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.
“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.
“About what?” He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.
“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”
“The books?”
He nodded.
“Absolutely real — have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and — Here! Lemme show you.”
Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”
“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too — didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.
Yep, think movie props or fake computer or books in an IKEA or other furniture store. Maybe a whole shelf with a cardboard structure simulating the spines of a bunch of books, but all empty inside.
I think that’s a relatively fair take. Personally I prefer ebooks or audiobooks mostly because I can put thousands in my pocket/e-reader and carry it with me and I prefer the experience of reading a book on my reader over paper.
For me, books are closer to art than functional objects. I have a wall of bookshelves in my house that I love and I’m slowly filling them with my favorite books. I will probably never reread any of them (I’ll read the ebook version instead) but I like looking at them and I like being able to loan them out or for them to be a conversation starter.
It took me a while to be ok with that (treating books as art) but I’ve made my peace with it. I’m buy 99% used books from places like AbeBooks online or Half Price Books locally and I have no interest in “books by the foot” or similar. It’s more like my bookshelves are mini-shrines to authors or series that have been impactful to me.
I don't know whether to call it fetishism, which has a negative undertone to me.
But I do love physical books. Even unimposing books, I like reading them but also touching them, their smell, their covers. And for art books, I think it goes without saying that the experience of the digital version is markedly different to the physical version.
I love going to a used books store and simply perusing their shelves, occasionally buying something, and a digital library simply cannot replicate this.
For how many thousands of years were books equivalent to absurd wealth. Kings might own a book, or several. Libraries were amazing, but places never seen by the proles and serfs. Thousands of years is a duration more than long enough to give our species some instinctual reverence for the object, reverence that is only reinforced by what we learn from an early age about those. And it's not just the wealth, at least for some sizable fraction of the population, we come to know books as things of knowledge and power, so slurring them as mere commodities is low-handed.
Books are, I think, in some small way, sacred. And I don't want to associate with people who think otherwise. I don't think you get it at all.
People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that