The Walk of Ideas in Berlin. (Lienhard Schulz.)

The excellent writer Luc Sante has an interesting article, “The Book Collection That Devoured My Life,” in the Wall Street Journal, about his compulsive book-collecting. Sante isn’t a bibliophile with a yen for first editions; he’s just a guy who loves the printed word and can’t keep his hands off of anything with two covers, even if it’s a volume he’s unlikely to read. Sante also comments on the digitization of books and the ascension of e-readers. An excerpt:

“These days it may appear that books, per se, are doomed. The electronic readers are ever lighter, smaller, and more sophisticated. Google is undertaking to scan and digitize every book in the world — not without some resistance. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that even the reading devices are pointless, since according to him nobody reads anymore, at least not in the sense of sequentially taking in long and complex works. I have nothing against the readers, and may find myself buying one eventually — they’d come in very handy on trips, the way the iPod does. I’m all in favor of the comprehensive digitizing of the world’s books, since that would very much ease small points of research (and I’m not worried about losing control of my copyrights, since it’s unlikely many people would read entire books online that way). As far as the decline of reading goes, I am nervous, but also believe that matters of taste and inclination do swing around on long orbits.

But I would very much miss books as material objects were they to disappear. The tactility of books assists my memory, for one thing. I can’t remember the quote I’m searching for, or maybe even the title of the work that contains it, but I can remember that the book is green, that the margins are unusually wide, and that the quote lies two-thirds of the way down a right-hand page. If books all appear as nearly identical digital readouts, my memory will be impoverished. And packaging is of huge importance, too–the books I read because I liked their covers usually did not disappoint. In the world of books, all is contingency and serendipity. Books are much more than container vessels for ideas. They are very nearly living things, or at least are more than the sum of their parts.”