A library without books.
They say it is our future - electronic collections of written works with nary a papered tome among them. I think it is a mournful future, yet one to which I have contributed. Many of my children's schoolbooks are read online and frequently these days I head to bed early to enjoy "Little Dorrit" on my smartphone. Who needs a hefty mass of encyclopedias when every fact is readily at my fingertips, thanks to my laptop or my phone with internet access?
They say it is our future - electronic collections of written works with nary a papered tome among them. I think it is a mournful future, yet one to which I have contributed. Many of my children's schoolbooks are read online and frequently these days I head to bed early to enjoy "Little Dorrit" on my smartphone. Who needs a hefty mass of encyclopedias when every fact is readily at my fingertips, thanks to my laptop or my phone with internet access?
Hearing about 144-year-old prep schools ditching their books, however, makes me terribly depressed and I wish I could manage a road trip to Massachusetts to rescue the discarded volumes. An electronic book is no more a true book than a photo album is a life. An electronic book has no life or history - no dogeared pages, no loving inscriptions, no underlined passages, no notes in the margins. There is no cover to judge it by, no musty smell of age that lingers in your nose. A book of paper has a life all its own, beyond the knowledge it stores.
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