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Ten Good Reasons the Book is Important

Over at Design Observer, writer Timothy Young gives 10 reasons why the book is still important. Number seven is that it is an object fixed in time:

“A book can tell us about its status in history. If we look through first editions of Moby Dick or Leaves of Grass, we find that they give away information not only about when they were created, but also about the worlds in which they were created, by way of advertisements, bindings, the quality of their paper, and watermarks on that paper. Such components are often not captured by scanning or are flattened out to make them of negligible use. In Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold—his saga about how libraries microfilmed runs of newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s and then discarded them—one of his chief complaints was that the filmers skipped advertising supplements and cartoons: things that had been deemed unimportant.”

Here’s the full list:

  1. It is a piece of technology that lasts
  2. It needs very little, if any, extra technology to be accessed
  3. The book retains evidence
  4. Books are true to form
  5. Each copy of a book is potentially unique
  6. Printed items are consumable goods
  7. A book is an object fixed in time
  8. A book can be an object of beauty and human craftsmanship
  9. When you are reading a book in a public place, other people can see what you are reading
  10. The Internet will never contain every book

One Comment

  1. […] related to Timothy Young’s list of the 10 good reasons the book is important, Oliver Farry writes on the comfort of well-worn books for the New […]

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