Why Books Are Still Powerful in the Digital Age
Some have decried it is the end of printed books. Quite the opposite. They are deeply rooted in our psyche, cultures and more.
One of my fondest childhood memories was going with my father to late night “press checks” at a printer. The smell of fresh ink, the long printing press of rollers, gears and the spitting out of printed sheets at the very end, stacking up in rapid fire. The banter with the press operators, them a sort of mechanical magician to me. Then pouring over the test runs, ensuring the colour balance, little marks my dad would make to guide the next run on the proofs.
You might wonder why a digital anthropologist would find books so fascinating and still so important in an age filled with screens, instant access to the world’s knowledge and the ability to create content so fast. It is because I propose that digital content and printed books create a form of binary opposition that actually strengthens both forms. That both must coexist for humanity’s future. (this is aside from that fact I’m writing a book I want printed.)
Printed books today represent an interesting intersection of material culture, social practices and norms and technological evolution. Books also remain what we might call “data persistent”. Digital storage formats require constant updating and don’t always reliably transmit their data to new mediums. Books from hundreds of years ago however, remain readable. Even scrolls from thousands of years ago, remain readable.
And old books are scannable into digital formats, even scrolls. A perfect example of this binary opposition working when we can scan ancient scrolls and use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to interpret them, bringing to light hidden knowledge.
Consider too that the UI (User Interface) might be the best we’ve ever created as a species. The physicality of turning pages and our collective spatial memory of where information resides in a book and the tactile feedback.
Reading books is often an act of ritual engagement. If you’re like me, you probably have a preferred time and place or places for reading. On a recent snowy Sunday I sat myself down with a steaming mug of tea and a good book in my reading chair and sat for hours reading. Or maybe you have a special spot on the couch? It was a ritual that’s played out thousands of times.
Books remain a significant form of social signalling as well as as a form of social capital. I do a fair number of news media interviews and video meetings. Displayed behind me are a set of bookshelves, filled to the tops. How often do we see bookshelves in the backgrounds of people in video meetings? This is social signalling that one is likely well read and thus we make an assumption of that persons intellectual skills. And that is a form of social capital.
Books too, are cognitive artefacts. They represent what might be called in cultural anthropology terms as “tools for thinking.” You can’t do a ctrl-F search on a book. They are finite and linear and support different types of cognitive thinking. They’re not just containers of knowledge and can shape how we think. Research has shown that our brains absorb and process print information better than reading from a screen.
As we’ve created more digital content, we have developed what in anthropology is referred to as “technological layering”, where rather than digital technology replacing books, they’ve found a new significance alongside their technology companions. Early technological determinists suggested print books would be gone. Instead they’ve become a more valuable social signal and sales are growing, not declining. Although non-fiction print sales have declined around .08%.
Books carry an authenticity and uniqueness that becomes more valuable as digital reproduction becomes faster and easier. Digital reading exists in a sort of eternal present time — always changeable, updatable, immediate. Physical books exist in durational time, carrying their visible age, their history, marking the passage of time.
Print books hold a very ancient and deeply rooted place in cultural practices around the world. They’ve long held deep cultural significance. Books are what we might call the “materiality of meaning” as they are human manifestations of thought. They provide a “totalising experience” as they engage multiple senses through weight, touch and smell.
Books can age with us at a very personal level. Carrying the stains of coffee, dog-eared corners, highlights, margin notes, the lines of a books spine when well read. They are biographical objects, carrying our life’s journey as we create meanings with them that can be both personal and familial. An eReader is more than likely to find its way to a recycle bin and not remain a treasured heirloom.
Books too occupy a sort of liminal space for humans. They are a mediating object, occupying a space between different cognitive states. A bridge between past and present (a childhood book remains the same into our adulthood), they connect author and reader across time and space. Books mediate between abstract thought and reality. Too, they are a threshold between individual and collective memory.
In a way, books create a sort of “elegant inefficiency” as anthropologist David Graeber has called it. They take up a fair bit of space in an inefficient way, but create valuable meaning that ignores the inefficiency. They are heavier (mostly) than an eReader and harder to search, but that too can create surprising discoveries. They cannot be instantly copied or shared, which creates a sort of artificial scarcity and human societies have long regarded scarcity as value.
Books contain symbols and narratives, key to cultural knowledge, that help us assign meanings to our experiences and understand cultural practices and beliefs. From religious texts to science fiction, fantasy and self-help books.
From sacred texts to academic texts and works of fiction, books have for centuries played a vital role in how we form our personal and collective identities.A significant reason that subconsciously, they remain so important in our psyche.
As the physical manifestation of our ideas, they form what we might call a need or desire for concrete thoughts.
Most books today also come in digital form, easily downloaded to an eReader or other device. Yet we still buy the physical versions. And digital still plays a role where we want digital for production, note tweaking, sharing, faster reference for various jobs we do.
The digital world has also played a role in the promotion of books as well. We have BookTube and BookTok reaching to new generations and older. On Goodreads, people categorise their physical libraries and share them. Many book clubs combine physical reading with digital discussion in forums.
Some research in cognitive anthropology suggests we are forming a sort of “cognitive redundancy” or multiple ways of knowing and remembering with the ability to switch between digital and physical.
Books take on so much meaning to us in so many ways and are so deeply embedded in our collective psyche that they are far from a lost medium. What we are doing is not rejecting one over the other, rather, we are evolving complex systems of when and how to use each format.
We are developing what I term as modal reading behaviours. Digital reading is more horizontal; scanning, skimming, referential. Print books are more vertical; deeper engagement, contemplative, sustained attention.
Consider that today how we might research a topic via digital sources, then buy a book associated to the topic for deeper understanding. On that book we might take digital notes then share quotes on social media from the book and engage on digital forums discussing the book. We may even combine all our notes from various books and use an LLM (an AI tool), to summarise them and find interesting bits. Yet it is the book we treasure the most.
It’s not a matter really of choosing one over the other, it’s about understanding when each format is suitable. Books will quite happily live in harmony with the digital realm and so far, this is proving to be the case and likely will for a long time to come. We are developing a form of intentional materiality where the choice of a physical book becomes more meaningful because we have digital alternatives.
We are still left in awe when we hold a treasured book from our childhood, or view a book that is hundreds of years old. Such emotional reactions are so intertwined with our psyche as a species that while we engage digitally more, books are far from done with humans as we are far from done with them.
Note: In writing this article I referenced several cultural anthropology and sociology text books and I used NotebookLM to search and summarise notes I’d taken from prior research projects. A rather elegant way of how these two technologies play well together. I did not use AI to write this article.