Someone has to say it: The smell of books is overrated

I like the way worn-out pages feel under my fingers. I like the musty smell of paper and binding. I like dog-eared corners in well-loved books.

And yet, every time anyone waxes poetic about the smell of old books during tirades against digital media, I get this urge to roll my eyes so far back that you can hear them getting stuck in the back of my head.

 In fact, somewhere, some poor soul with nothing better to do probably has witnessed this while watching C-SPAN2, which aired certain speaker panels and discussions at the Tucson Festival of Books, including a panel titled “The Changing Landscape of Journalism.”

Somewhat ironically, I live-tweeted all of my problems with this panel, but the part that made me roll my eyes was when a woman my age stood up and approached a microphone that had been made available for audience members to ask questions.

This woman went on an impassioned ramble about her love for books and the way they smell and how one time for Christmas she received a Kindle from her sister and she packed the Kindle in a suitcase with some books and she took the suitcase on a trip and when she arrived at her destination, the books had dented the Kindle and she could no longer read from it and holy cow, you guys, she didn’t miss it.

Everyone in the room burst into applause, and somewhere on some C-SPAN2 footage is my face, rolling my eyes and demanding to know what exactly her question for the panel was.

In my defense, I love the printed word. I like looking at bookshelf porn. Typewriters are sexy. I love anyone who loves the smudged ink of newspapers on their fingertips. But I hate that I have to defend my faithfulness to print just because I don’t hate Kindles and iPads.

For one thing, those things are undeniably convenient. Last summer, I interned in downtown Los Angeles. I drove to work three days in a row and each time imagined that my last breath would be taken as my tiny, turtle-shaped Mazda tail-spun into a pole because a crazed Prius driver couldn’t be bothered to use his turn signal. So I stopped driving, and took the subway to work each day.

It turns out that you have no idea how much elbow space you need to read a book or fold a newspaper back until you try to do it standing in a crowded subway car. 

But the beauty of digital media extends beyond its convenience. It’s about accessibility and interaction. I agree that there is something romantic about the physical aspect of a book or a newspaper. The sensory experience is what makes print media so precious. But words are words, and digital media opens up access to those words from all over the world. And you get to discuss those stories with people all over the world instantaneously.

That’s really what made me love print media in the first place. I believe in storytelling, and digital media makes storytelling possible across millions of miles. I wouldn’t trade that for any smell.