On Saving Books

After reading the article, "How the E-Book Will Change How We Read and Write," I don't know where to begin. I am not sure how to write this blog without sounding like a whiny little girl. Let me begin by explaining a little bit: over the summer, I decided to start a website which I planned to turn into an organization. The website is now up, though it is a work in progress, and here is the address if anyone reading this would like to visit it: www.savingbooks.weebly.com. Last spring semester, I had a teacher who said in my Lit. class one night, "You know, books are becoming less and less important in today's world with everything that is going on online. Pretty soon books as we know them will be obsolete." It really got me thinking, and I thought at the time that a decrease in physical books would lead to a decrease in reading which would in turn lead to a decrease in literacy. After reading this article, though, I think that I made some pretty naive assumptions about this. While I still don't like the idea of getting rid of physical books altogether, after reading everything in class that I have read these last two weeks and participating in the discussions and even blogging for the first time and seeing its usefulness, I have to admit that literacy is probably not in any imminent danger. What is in danger though, is the way we perceive and receive books. At first, I thought the author of this article was against the idea of putting all books online, as I am. But as I read on, I realized that he was focusing on how things will be different; observations, rather than negative assumptions. I like all the different points Johnson makes about the subject (indeed, he seems to address every possible angle of the issue, and I was completely impressed). Also, when he talks about the competition that books will have, and the way he just clicked from one book to another in a split second, later saying that our reading of books will soon be the same as our reading of magazines and newspapers: "a little bit here, a little bit there," I can't help but wonder what will become of books when all of them are online. Yes, they will be more readily available to us, since the internet is more available than books or bookstores anymore. Yes, it will be more convenient to read little bits of books rather than to sit down with the whole novel. But is that what we as writers (and editors) really want? Don't we want our audience's full attention? That's another point that Johnson brings up: the fact that moving books online will remove the private relationship between author and reader. But isn't that what we want? People who read books are looking for alone time, they are looking for time to spend just living out someone or something else's reality for just a bit. When you ar reading someone's personal work, that is the only way to get it. With everything else that is on the internet that will be competing with books, how do we know that books will not just slowly disappear?