There is something wonderfully inefficient about a physical book.
You have to carry it around, it takes up space, and if you move houses you discover just how many of them you own. Perhaps you even begin to question some of your life choices while carrying another box marked BOOKS up the stairs. When I was on sabbatical last summer to begin working on my doctoral dissertation, it was pretty incovenient to lug books in and out of coffee shops. Though, the looks I received were pretty humerous.
A digital library solves nearly all of these problems. Hundreds, even thousands, of volumes can travel with you on a device thinner than a single hardback. You can search instantly, and enlarge the print with a click of a button. You can carry Calvin, Augustine, Bunyan, Lewis, and a dozen commentaries onto an airplane without paying an overweight baggage fee.
I understand the appeal. I use digital books, and I am thankful for them. They are extraordinarily useful tools. However, I refuse to give up physical books.
In fact, the older I get, the more convinced I become that there are some efficiencies that are not improvements.
A Book Is Something You Hold
Reading has always been a physical activity. You take a book from the shelf, feel its weight in your handm crack it open, find your place, and turn the pages one at a time.
A good book even slowly begins to show evidence that it belongs to you. The spine loosens, pages bend, corners get creased, and your bookmark sticks out of the top.
Certain passages are underlined and others are highlighted. A question mark appears in the margin beside something you are not sure you understand, and exclamation points mark notes you do not want to forget.
Sometimes there are coffee stains, and at my house, there’s a good chance that a child has scribbled on a page. Sometimes an old bulletin, receipt, photograph, or scrap of paper becomes a permanent bookmark because you happened to stick it there ten years ago.
None of that is particularly efficient or spectacular, but it is wonderfully human.
There is a difference between possessing the information contained in a book and possessing a book.
My digital library contains texts, but my shelves contain books I have lived with.
The Marks Become Part of the Reading
I love opening an old book and discovering a previous version of myself.
I find something I underlined ten years ago and wonder why it seemed so important to me then, or I discover a paragraph that I somehow failed to mark at all and cannot imagine how I missed it.
Sometimes I disagree with my old marginal note, and sometimes I smile at it. Oftentimes I find that I wrote the date beside a passage because it met me at precisely the right moment.
This is one of the quiet pleasures of rereading physical books. You are not merely returning to the author, but returning to your previous encounter with the author. The book has become a record of the conversation.
That is why I have never been particularly interested in keeping my books pristine. Books are meant to be used. So, I highlight, underline, write in the margins, circle words, and draw arrows. I even fold my corners, and I realize some readers will consider that comment sufficient grounds for church discipline. Use a bookmark if you are more civilized.
A well-read book should look well read. The wear is part of its history.
Physical Books Help Me Remember Where I Read Something
There is another advantage that is harder to quantify. I often remember ideas spatially. I may not remember the exact page number, but I remember that the quotation was somewhere near the beginning of the book, on the left-hand page, perhaps halfway down.
I remember the yellow highlighting and the margin I scribbled in. I can recall where the book sits on my shelf.
Digital reading can certainly preserve highlights and notes, and search functions are enormously helpful. But there is something different about remembering an argument as something encountered there—on that page, in that chapter, in that particular volume.
Maybe in ways that I cannot really explain, the physicality of the book becomes part of your memory.
A Library Is More Than Storage
Then there are the shelves themselves.
A personal library is a peculiar kind of autobiography. Look at someone’s bookshelves long enough and you begin to learn something about him. There are the books he bought because he needed them and volumes he bought because he hoped to become the sort of person who would read them. You can tell the books he has read repeatedly, and the books he started and abandoned.
There are books inherited from someone else, given by friends, from college, from seminary, and books connected to particular seasons of ministry, work, marriage, parenthood, suffering, or joy.
There are books I can pull from my shelf and immediately remember where I was when I first read them.
That cannot be replicated by scrolling through a list of titles on a screen.
A library occupies space because learning occupies a life, and I think there is something wonderful about that.
Books Also Live in a Home
Physical books do something else that digital books cannot do very well. A shelf full of books or a library make reading visible.
A child can see his father’s Bible sitting beside his chair, books stacked on a nightstand, wander past a bookshelf and pull something down simply because the title looks interesting.
A friend visiting your home can notice a book and say, “I’ve been wanting to read that.” You can respond, “Take it.” Then you can actually hand him the book. There is something beautifully ordinary about that exchange.
Books move between people. They are borrowed, recommended, given away, returned with new marks, and occasionally never returned at all.
The Inconvenience May Be Part of the Gift
We live in an age increasingly designed to remove friction. Everything should be instant, searchable, portable, and available everywhere at once.
Much of that is genuinely good, but perhaps not every inconvenience needs to be eliminated.
A physical book asks something of you.
You have to choose which book to bring, you have to sit with it, turn the page, find your place again, and make room for it in your home or study.
You cannot carry your entire library everywhere, so you must decide which books deserve to be near you.
Those limitations may actually deepen our relationship with books. The very inconvenience that makes physical books technologically inferior may be part of what makes them personally valuable.
I Want to Leave Books Behind
There is one final reason I cannot imagine surrendering my physical library. Someday, someone else will own these books.
I hope my children will pull volumes from my shelves long after I am gone, and when they do, I want them to find more than the author’s words. I want them to find mine.
Perhaps they will open a book and see a sentence I underlined. They may find important written beside a paragraph. They may discover an argument with which I disagreed, a quotation I loved, a date written beside a passage, or a note pointing them toward another book. Maybe they will recognize the handwriting immediately.
In that sense, a library can become a small inheritance. Not merely because the books have monetary value; most of them probably will not. Bu they will bear witness to a life of reading. They will show show the next owner what interested me, formed me, challenged me, what I returned to, and what I thought worth remembering.
A password to a digital library does not feel quite the same.
Keep the Books
So I am not declaring war on the Kindle, and I am not deleting my digital library. I am certainly not giving up searchable PDFs. There are moments when the ability to search hundreds of pages in seconds feels like a minor miracle.
Digital books are useful, but usefulness is not the only measure of a thing.
I still want bookshelves full of books with bookmarks sticking out at odd angles. I want highlights and underlines and notes crowded into margins, and to remember that a certain quotation was halfway down the left-hand page. I want to lend books to friends, my children to see me reading them, and someday, I want them to inherit books that look as though their father actually enjoyed them.
So, yes, give me the searchable library and the convenience of carrying a thousand books in my pocket. But give me the old book too. I will gladly carry the arm-full of books with the worn covers, creased corners, fading highlights, and handwritten notes in the margin.
Some things are worth holding onto.