Why Physical Books Still Matter

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There are small fidelities in life that survive every new invention. For me, one of them is the feel of a book. Like a red-blooded bibliophile, a book’s weight, smell and ink makes me happy.

We change phones every two years, laptops every five, yet a book printed fifty years ago still opens with the same soft crackle. It carries the dignity of ceremony.

I remember once travelling with a couple of heavy hardcovers in my bag – a collection of essays by Montaigne and Christopher Hitchens. By the time I reached my hotel, my shoulder ached and my practical self muttered about the efficiency of a Kindle.

But that same evening when I opened the Hitchens book in the hotel room, the spine creaked like a door to a private chapel. The faint smell of paper, the firmness of the binding, the sight of my pencilled notes in the margin – I mean these are the small rituals that turn reading into something sublime, something more than consumption. You can’t replicate that with a screen. An e-book never sighs when you close it.

There is something intimate about reading physical books. I may sound like I am exaggerating, but those who are smitten, let’s say, with hardcovers would know what I mean.

See, any reader who has ever loved a book knows the strange affection they develop for its physical form. Think of Borges. Even when he went blind, he never gave up on the tactility of his books. Virginia Woolf once wrote – “a good book is not merely read, it is lived.”

The physicality of reading, the weight of the book on your palm, the inadvertent scribbles, the occasional thumbprint – all connect the mind to the body.

Reading on paper slows you down. It makes you inhabit language, not skim it. Screens, in contrast, cultivate velocity. You scroll, you highlight, you swipe.

The words disappear as soon as they are consumed, leaving no sediment of thought behind. Try to recall a passage from an e-book you read last year, you probably can’t. It’s hard enough to remember from a physical book, but from a screen, it’s almost impossible.

Because memory, like ink, thrives on the tactile. The philosopher Walter Benjamin once noted that to collect books is to “physically renew the past.” Each worn cover, each yellowed page, is a continuation of that renewal.

A good library, unlike its digital counterpart, is not a data center but a landscape of touch. I once bought a used World War II book – it was well-worn and in need of restoration.

Back home, as I flipped through the pages, I found a faded pink bus ticket inside. It was a reminder that reading a physical book is a communal act across generations. Digital files, on the other hand, have no ghosts. They leave no traces of the living who passed through them.

So, keep your devices for convenience, but let your books remain for pleasure. Let your paperbacks breathe near the coffee cup, your hardcovers rest like old saints on the shelf. The tablets can hum, the phone can glow, but neither knows how to age and therefore neither knows how to remember.

I refuse to accept that with all the buzz around AI, books will cease to exist. On the contrary, I believe we bibliophiles will press even harder against forgetting, against velocity, against the illusion that knowledge can be weightless. After all, the printed book endures because it insists on being held. And in holding it, we remember, briefly, what it means to be human.

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