The tactile sense ...

Yours truly loves to read as you, my loyal readers already know. With the net, one can peruse material in ways beyond the kin of man just 20 years ago but with this new found power comes a price, the price of the tactile sense of picking up a book and reading it without the need of power save that of enough light to make it happen.

The great irony, of course, is that I’ve never read more digitally in my life. Each day, I spend hours reading on my iPhone – news articles, blog posts and essays. Short to mid-length content feels indigenous to the size, resolution and use cases of smartphones, and many online publications (such as this very site) display their content with beautiful typography and layouts that render consistently on any computer, tablet or smartphone. Phones also allow us to share articles with minimal effort. The easy romance between our smartphones and short-to-mid-length articles and video is part of the reason why venture capitalists have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into New York publishing upstarts such as Vox, Vice and Buzzfeed. The smartphone coupled with the open web creates a near-perfect container for distributing journalism at a grand scale.

But what of digital books? What accounts for my unconscious migration back to print?

Once bought by a reader, a book moves through a routine. It is read and underlined, dog-eared and scuffed and, most importantly, reread. To read a book once is to know it in passing. To read it over and over is to become confidants. The relationship between a reader and a book is measured not in hours or minutes but, ideally, in months and years.

Seen below is a perfect example of why moving back to physical from digital makes perfect sense when viewing a modern rendition of the 12th century masterpiece The Conference of the Birds complete with elegant text & calligraphy, combined with exquisite paper to create a tactile experience of a different kind.

The object – a dense, felled tree, wrapped in royal blue cloth – requires two hands to hold. The inner volume swooshes from its slipcase. And then the thing opens like some blessed walking path into intricate endpages, heavystock half-titles, and multi-page die-cuts, shepherding you towards the table of contents. Behbehani utilitises all the qualities of print to create a procession. By the time you arrive at chapter one, you are entranced.

Contrast this with opening a Kindle book – there is no procession, and often no cover. You are sometimes thrown into the first chapter, sometimes into the middle of the front matter. Wherein every step of opening The Conference of the Birds fills one with delight – delight at what one is seeing and what one anticipates to come – opening a Kindle book frustrates. Often, you have to swipe or tap back a dozen pages to be sure you haven’t missed anything.

There is a cost to everything as dictated by the two laws of thermodynamics with the first being 24/7 access to the world's literature, courtesy the web, vs. the loss of tactile contained in the essence of reading a well worn physical book. Seen below is The Conference of the Birds 16th century style. :)

Any questions? :)