There is an old video that from time to time circulates on the networks, where a teenager with glasses, with the face of a precocious sage, explains in detail what the gadget in his hand is about, and which he considers practical and simple to use. use, among its advantages is that it does not need batteries or plugging in. It’s called a book, explains the boy with a didactic air.
In March of this year I sat down to listen with fascination to the debate between publishers on “The paper book and the digital book” held in Malaga within the framework of the Writers’ Festival of the Vargas Llosa Chair, in which Pilar Reyes, from Penguin Random House, Enrique Redel, from Impedimenta, Joan Tarrida, from Galaxia Gutenberg, and Phil Camino, from La Huerta Grande, moderated by Ramiro Villapadierna.
Do we still prefer the paper book? How much strength has the digital format gained? Are we at the gates of an irreversible change in the way of reading? Did reading habits change during the pandemic? Will the paper book be just a nostalgic memory in the memory of the old?
Among the surprises that I have had when listening to the conversation, the first is that the paper book, as we have known it since the printing press was invented, with pages that can be turned by wetting your finger and between which you can place a pointer, the book that can be caressed, weighed, put your nose into it to smell its aroma of new ink or old paper, far from dying forgotten, is in the process of being reborn, imposing itself on the threats of its disappearance.
The triumph of the tangible against the intangible, of reality against illusion, of matter against the simulation of matter. When we close a book halfway through reading, the human brain, which is endowed with geo-orientation, knows which page we are on and where to return to. The process slows down when we read on a quartz slate, because the memory of the reading changes, and the brain becomes disoriented when we start reading again. He doesn’t know where he was last time. There are no pages forward or back.
The drastic reduction in newspaper circulations, and the disappearance of their printed editions, in many cases, clearly speaks of the transfer of news reading to the digital space. But it is not the same to find out what is happening in the world just by looking at the screen of the cell phone, than to indulge in the reading of a book, for which we will need several sittings. Not simply an act of instant information, but of meditation, and of dialogue with the writer and with ourselves; of questions that open to other questions, of unsatisfied answers. An endless journey.
Of every hundred books sold in Spain, only 5 are in digital format, a proportion that in the United States grows to 25%, made up mainly of cheap romantic and police novels, what has been called “pulp fiction” , books to read and throw away, which are easy to unbind; and, in this case, delete. And the pandemic, which gave us that space of time and solitude to watch series, and to read, increased the sale of paper books, while the download of electronic books stagnated.
Another novelty: almost everything that is read digitally is pirated. And it is in the world of books in Spanish where piracy dominates, up to 75%, a sad leading role, because those who send one another books through the networks, are not aware that it is a robbery, and all the work behind it; because if the digital book is true that it does not go through the printing and binding process, there is the copyright of the person who wrote it, the work of editing, proofreading, formatting, and translation when there is one.
Of course, the digital book does not consume entire forests to make paper, as is the case with printed books, and it helps to rid humanity of ecological disasters. And in the most distant and forgotten of villages, a library of thousands of copies can be installed with just a few screens and an Internet connection, which in turn opens the way to dozens of large digital libraries in the world. A democratic distribution of the possibilities of reading, not only literary, but scientific, and of technical and school training.
If the sale of disposable books grows in the digital world, that of children’s books, which are necessarily paired with illustrations, grows in the material world, because they are books that are read in company, between children and adults, with the pleasure of review those beautiful illuminated pages, and read the same story over and over again; just like larger-format art books, which are objects of desire, and which can only be entered with sensory delight, in an act of true lust.
Let’s return to the topic of reality and simulation. The electronic book is nothing but an imitation of the real book. The format, the typography, the texture and the matt color of the page that we think we have in front of us, are faked. With the digital book, nothing has been done but to invent what was already invented in a tangible way. An avatar, like all other inhabitants of the metaverse.
When we turn off the blackboard, the book has ceased to exist, it has returned to the nothingness from which it came. It is not our. It cannot be given away or inherited. We will not find it in any of those sanctuaries that are the old bookstores. It is a ghost that cannot be placed in the row of books on the shelf where we know the real books are, and to which we can return whenever we want.
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