The Book is a Book, not Disembodied Information

Believing that the book is just abstract information that can be merely held on a stick is an error we will call dimension overtrucation.

Definition: Dimension overtruncation is a form of Procrustean-bed reduction in which the simplification of an object, phenomenon, or process proceeds beyond the level that can be justified without material loss. It arises when attention is confined to readily observable dimensions while latent or less visible dimensions, which may be essential, are ignored. Thus, an item may be consciously used or understood in terms of one stated purpose while its actual role, value, or reason for persistence depends substantially on other, unrecognized dimensions.

I read Victor Hugo’s Les misérables when I was thirteen. The book remained in our family library in Lebanon for years, then somehow strayed from it, as books tend to do, serially running away with each borrower. A few years ago, I found it again on the shelves of a relative. It was the Pléiade edition, printed in dense type on thin, Bible-like paper, and had survived for nearly half a century. I held it in my hands and did not need to open it to recover, in a flash, the gripping experience of reading it—particularly the passage in which Cosette suddenly felt the bucket she had been struggling to carry become light: Jean Valjean had taken hold of it and was helping her carry it.

I smelled the book: it was a period smell for printing techniques, at the time, used different materials. I won’t do a Proustian madeleine tirade here about the potency of the olfactory dimension; just note an inseparability here. I will never know whether it was holding the book or smelling it that brought the episode back.

The physicality of the book –more than its content –is what makes it real. I saw then that one cannot effectively separate the physical presence from the reading experience.

Not long afterwards, there was some excitement about the arrival of the Kindle, a hand held device for reading electronic books. It was roughly the size of a standard book hence claimed to emulate the conventional format. The main reason I heard of it was because The Black Swan was the book used by Jeff Bezos during the launch press conference as he was making annotations on the virtual pages during the demonstration. I was horrified; I like books, and by books I mean that inconvenient thing you hold in your hand, pick up from a table, and carry in your backpack. Every book must be a separate item –a single book with different contents induces a loss in differentiation.

Things got worse when I met Daniel Kahneman on the following day and he was singing the praises of the Kindle. I tried to explain to him that reading virtual formats miss a fundamental dimension. I had just read the story by the Russian scientist A.R. Luria about some kind of memory genius whose ploy consisted in associating phrases with physical objects, applying the mnemonic trick ancient Greeks call the method of the loci. Each locus has to be spacially separed. Furthermore I had discovered quite early on that things you read online are hard to remember. Kahneman wavered between the excitement of neomania and the convenience of academic research on one hand and, on the other, a compelling psychological argument coming from his discipline. He agreed half heartedly. You could carry an entire library on that device and pick what you want on your next trip to Chicago, that type of thing, was his argument.

This is the classical Procrustean bed type of reduction in dimensionality. You think you are reading abstract content but we are not abstract beings and the physical book recruits more channels than you can intellectually perceive.

I keep notes on the front page of my books, referring to the corresponding page. I often consult them while looking for references –like just now. I realized that all I have to do is find the book in my library, pull it out of the shelves, and the idea referenced in it would come to me in a flash. It is practically impossible for me to work entirely from electronic formats. As to more complicated subjects, say mathematical material, only the physical works –I could tell that complicated stuff required physical paper from seeing my students printing out the assigned reading and taking notes on them.

This inseparability of the content and its embodiment is the reason I’ve decided to keep every book I’ve read in the original format in which I have read it. This is not for any functional or pragmatic reason. This is not for any reason other than existential: once you’ve read a book, you are effectively rereading it every time you take a glance at it.