Five years ago, the literary world was seized by a collective panic over the doomed future of print books. As readers migrated to digital devices, ebook sales soared over the roof, with over 1,000 percent growth only within 2008 and 2010. Book sellers were now seeing their customers browse the store only to find titles in which they would later purchase online. Print sales then dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors prayed that ebooks didn’t destroy their business. 

In 2011, the fears became reality when the international book retailer Borders became bankrupt.

Yet the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While projections showed digital books completely dominating print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply. Now, there are signs of e-book adopters returning to print, or becoming readers who juggle devices and paper. As a major printed book reader myself, I believe that they are a huge achievement and therefore should be preserved and kept within our lives for generations to come. Here are a select few of the many reasons why the book is exceeding to the ebook.

1)Browsing
On a brightly-lit Sunday afternoon, you enter a new bookstore that just opened up across the street. As you step inside,  an old, smoky, gritty smell wafts over you. The storekeeper beams a warm and friendly smile, and welcomes you into his domain. Hushed, yet cheerful voices echo between the shelves like a low bell chime. This great atmosphere of finding books in a library or bookstore, can never be met while buying books online. Online browsing tends to be targeted, with a clear start and finish: I am looking for a fiction book, my mood sways me towards science fiction, and then I am narrowed down to a very specific selection of books. Bookstore or library browsing though, is usually the opposite. You can go to a section and look for an exact author, but you will almost always end up looking at other books in the meanwhile.  The journey of finding a book in a bookstore is extremely fortuitous, but the adventure will always prove to be as amazing as the book itself.

2) Sleep Patterns
Ever since you were a child, you have known that reading before going to bed improves your sleep quality, correct? Well, sort of. A 2014 Harvard study states of reading a back-lit e-reader disrupts your sleep, and will make you a lot more tired the next day. This is because our body is completely in tune with the rhythm of day and night, due to an internal biological clock called the Circadian Rhythm that uses light to tell the time. But blue light, the wave length that is emitted from ebooks, will disrupt this body clock. It slows or even prevents the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin. Throughout the experiment, twelve test subjects were locked within a chamber, where they were given five days to read digitally, and five days to read from a book. The results clearly showed that during the first five days they took longer to fall asleep, and had less deep sleep. On the other hand, reading a printed book right before bed results in lowered cortisol levels, and reduced anxiety. Only six minutes worth of reading a paper book before going to bed will diminish stress by around 68%. After staring at our digital devices for an entire day, what our body really wants to do before going to bed, is just reading a printed book.

3) A value beyond monetary

One of my fondest memories was of my mother teaching me how to read through the Doraemon comic book series. Together we would laugh and cry over the characters, as if they were our brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles. Throughout the comics you would also find dog ears on the pages that we found too hilarious or bitter to forget. Nowadays, my mother is extremely occupied with her work and we don’t have half as much time to spend with one another. Within those few comics, are reminders of my childhood with my mother, along with emotions that I can’t put into words. Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is no friend as loyal as a book.” But would he have said the same about the Kindle, the Nook, the iPad? Printed books carry an intangible sentimental value that cannot be obtained by other mundane objects. All of us have incredible moments from the past that has taken shape in an old book.

Nonetheless, I accept that the book cannot be simply be defended by logical arguments alone. E-readers are practical, they can be used anywhere and will not suffer the decomposition that is the blight of books. Certainly, I can see why the e-book has gained much popularity, but they are by no means a replacement for the real thing. Books contain within them a “something” that cannot be described gratifyingly but which will give them the edge over the digital counterparts. A “something” that is sentimental and “gushy” which makes them infinitely better. Teresa, a middle school student expressed this special thing as, “Feeling the pages wrinkle beneath your fingers, the feeling of comfort when I look over at my bookshelf and see all the books stacked with random annotations and bookmarks from fifth grade. There is definitely something special about the way that you become absorbed in a paper book.” So perhaps ebooks will have the upper hand in terms of portability and compactibility, but they will never be able to “mimic” the wonderful, indescribable, and passionate “something” that the printed book has.

When I grow up, I don’t want my children to be embarrassed by their father, who still spends his time reading printed books, an equivalent to a middle aged man with  CD players. I don’t want to walk the halls of an art gallery and see printed books among the shelves. Reading a printed book shouldn’t become something unconventional, but instead cherished as they are today. The joys of browsing a bookstore, reading before going to sleep, and precious memories stored within books shouldn’t be lost. Will the kids of the future boast about the abundance of their electronic files, instead of their ‘many leather-bound books’? I definitely hope not, but I know I would be disappointed. I am powerless to stop the digital library march alone, but I’ll pick a spiral-bound printed book anyday.