Much has changed since the first stories were told in the oral tradition, passed from one person to the next, sometimes losing things, sometimes gaining things as it went along. Stories progressed to be written on stone, then papyrus, vellum, and parchment. Soon stories went from the scrolls of old to codexes, the first “bound book” as we would recognize it. And eventually books evolved into what we see them as today.

But even today, books continue to evolve. Books are no longer simply the paper and ink products that we can buy in brick and mortar stores or through the internet. Now books are becoming more and less. The same as the oral stories of old once did.     We’ve all seen the progression of books to audio books, but now we see the e-book. It’s not unexpected that books have progressed this way, it’s the direction our world is taking and to survive in a world like that even books must change their ways.

But what do we gain? And what do we lose?

When the Sony Reader and the Kindle came out we saw the beginnings of this new evolution of the book. With these devices, we, as readers, can store multiple books on this device, we can change the font of the novel, we can download books wirelessly, and the list goes on and on. A new electronic reader was recently released which is what got me thinking about all this to begin with. The Nook, Barnes and Noble’s new electronic reader, is similar to the other electronic readers I’ve already mentioned, although it does offer the ability to lend your e-books to your friends.

But very simply with an electronic reader, it seems to me, that we lose the feeling of the book. It just becomes words on a screen. To be able to change the font of a book is convenient if we dislike a particular font, but most likely the font that was chosen for a story was chosen for a reason. And I think we lose something when we change that font. Reading a book is a journey, an experience. And when we remove the physical object with the cover and pages, we lose some of that experience. The electronic readers give us the words and the story, but with them we lose the feeling of a book in our hands, of turning the pages to discover the next part of the adventure. We even lose, odd as this may sound, the smell of a book, of the paper that was used to make it. We can experience a physical book will all of our senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, even taste, although as much as I love books, I can’t say I’ve gone that far). But we can feel the book in our hands, hear the slight scrape of paper against paper as we turn the page, we can try to see our idea of the characters in the representation on the cover. I know I for one, find a sense of comfort from the smell of a new book and the smell of a well loved, well read book.

However, from the electronic readers, we gain the ability to carry 1,500 novels with us all at once. We gain the ability to read a few chapters before we decide to download and buy an electronic book. We gain the ability to buy a book no matter where we are and have it at our fingertips instantaneously. We can decide what we want to read at any given moment and not have to worry about whether we thought to bring a particular book with us. And being light weight, slim, and generally small in size, an electronic reader is a lot more convenient to carry around than a book.

We gain a lot of things from the e-readers. But we lose a lot, too. Realistically, what we lose or gain from an e-reader might be a discussion that seems somewhat irrelevant because we can’t change the direction in which books are progressing. Books are becoming electronic and that isn’t going to stop. But even if we can’t change where books are going, I think it’s important to see what we have with books right now and what books will become as they continue to evolve. In my opinion, although I know where books are going, I don’t like the idea of e-readers and e-books. To me, a book is not only the story, but the physical cover and pages, and I will choose a physical book over an e-book up until that option is no longer available to me at all.