Technology is disrupting every aspect of our lives, particularly the way we consume media. iPods and the MP3 format changed how we listened to music. Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and a whole slew of streaming services are turning the tables on the old business model of network television and film studios. The onslaught of online blogs and news sources is sending the newspaper industry into an existential crisis. Books have somewhat managed to stand their ground in a rapidly digitising world, but this is not to say that there are no contenders vying for readers’ attention on the horizon.

Ask any traditionalist bibliophile about e-readers or e-books and they are sure to wince and wax poetic about the primal human need to be able to touch, and thus the importance of the feel of paper books. In this respect, e-readers have kindled a debate about the future of the book publishing industry itself, as they aim to fundamentally change how we consume and interact with a particular media. While traditionalists may baulk at any notion of reading on a flickering screen, electronic readers have some key advantages over their paper counterparts — for one thing, the ability to store and carry a whole library in the palm of one’s hand. People can read on their e-reader and resume from where they left off on a desktop or mobile app. The bookshelf goes into the ‘cloud’ from where it cannot be stolen, forgotten, misplaced or worse — borrowed by a friend who has no intention of returning it. Then there is the ambient light of many new e-readers that, with their backlit screens, permit reading under the covers. With a physical book, in the spirit of staying true to basics, one could do that with a candle, although that’s strictly not advisable.

Electronic ink on electronic paper is essentially magnetic ink that mimics the appearance, if not the feel, of paper pages. A tap on the screen for the next page sends a static charge through which the magnetic ink rearranges itself to ‘form’ the next page, all within a fraction of a second. Yet despite the many advantages of their electronic cousins, paper books still seem to be enjoying robust sales: in 2016, according to industry data, paper book sales registered growth in both the United Kingdom and the United States whereas e-readers appeared to flounder. According to Euromonitor International, sales of e-reader devices declined by 40 percent from 2011 to 2016.

As purists and technophiles battle over form, a reader points out that this conflict is age-old and at the end of the day, only the story matters

Aside from the economics of price, distribution and availability, there are deeper reasons that people still buy paper books, which could broadly fall within the emotional and functional domain: books are articles of faith — both literally and metaphorically. The sacred texts of all the different creeds of humanity have been inscribed in volumes of books that constitute their scriptures. Enclosing their liturgies in books is a rite of passage for all major religions, and it is no coincidence that the first book mass-produced by the inventor of the modern printing press, Johannes Gutenberg, in the mid-13th century, was the Bible.

On a more personal level, books are external fragments of our own selves that we consciously or unconsciously project on to others. Through that lens, one can see bookshelves not as furniture, but as a stacked curation of one’s identity. The rows and columns of our books are a display of our intellect, sophistication and fine taste, in as much as they are a display of the books themselves.

Then there is the functional form of the book that makes this medium indispensable. Books are fantastically ergonomic. Nothing compares to the touch and feel of a paperback on a breezy afternoon; they are portable and convenient and no training — or battery power — is required to operate or use them.

But it must be accepted that books appeared rather late on the grand canvas of history. Before books, before even writing was invented, the preliterate world functioned on oral traditions. Roving bards rhapsodised poems of epic proportions purely from memory. The Iliad and the Odyssey, two foundational texts of western literature, are speculated to have been actually collected and written down by Homer who, instead of being the real author, may have been a mere scribe committing these tales to writing.

This ancient method of conveying tales has proven to be remarkably resilient even to the present times, as wandering minstrels in and around the Balkans, namely Albania and the Yugosphere (present-day countries that make up the former Yugoslavia), recite epic poems that can go on for hours, if not days. Similarly, the bards of Rajasthan melodiously express the epic of Pabuji, an approximately 600-year-old poem whose line-by-line recitation takes a full five nights of eight-hour, dusk-till-dawn sessions.

When writing systems developed, these windborne poems and sagas were cast quite literally in stone, such as the cuneiform tablets found in ancient Sumeria (present-day Iraq). The ancient Egyptians preferred papyrus to inscribe hieroglyphs rather than letters of the alphabet. Codices — the precursors to our modern books — did not gain wide acceptance well until the 8th century. The vellum (calfskin) folios within these codices were the ancestors of paper pages, and the only method of reproduction took months as priests in monastery scriptoriums laboured to copy manuscripts by hand. These early books were used only by the priests and clergy in Medieval Europe since the general population was illiterate and, at the time, there was no concept of education and literacy as a basic human right. Much like books themselves, human rights and universal state-sponsored education only sprung to the fore in the 19th century.

The first paper books came into prominence during the civil wars of Reformation Europe when the Catholic and Protestant schism drove the continent to the brink. In the battle of doctrine, a pressing need arose for portable propaganda that could influence and incite the masses. The speed and efficiency needed to mass-produce this propaganda could not be matched by the traditional codices, and it was here that Gutenberg’s printing press came to the rescue.

Gutenberg is considered to have invented the modern printing press; modern, because the Chinese were already using paper for their writings as early as the second century. Gutenberg’s success lay in using metal typefaces arranged on a metal frame. As ink distilled over the type, the frame was pressed to paper, allowing for multiple reproductions of the same text. The first books were religiously motivated, keeping with the zeitgeist of the time and Martin Luther — the incensed priest who started the wars of Reformation himself — used the printing press to rile the masses against the Pope and the Catholic Church. As for Gutenberg, now that his innovation had changed the course of history, in gratitude for his services his debtors forced him into bankruptcy; he died mired in poverty.

It was the universal education laws emanating from Enlightenment Europe, the spread of democracy and the many advances in technology, such as offset printing, that made books the mass phenomenon that they are today. At the turn of the 20th century a profusion of new forms of the printed word began to appear and newspapers, gazettes, broadsheets, pamphlets and novellas ushered in the age of mass literacy in the West.

In the grand scheme of history, books are vectors, or carriers, of ideas. Seen through this lens, digital mediums are just a resumption of the millennia-old trend of humanity coming up with new ways to communicate their ideas, myths, legends and stories. Nothing about the ‘physicality’ of books should be sacrosanct. In that sense, electronic readers do not pose an existential threat to books — at least not in the short term. For a comparative understanding, note that papyrus scrolls were around for centuries even as codices became the standard in Middle Ages Europe.

There will always be new mediums coming up to do things in strange new ways. Take audiobooks, for example. As the name suggests, they are the spoken or read version of books —sometimes by the authors themselves — recorded in digital audio formats. This brings us full circle to where it all started: the roving bards and poets at civilisation’s dawn when man was utterly innocent of letters, and books and the accompanying literacy were millennia away. As a reader, ideally one’s fealty should be to the substance, not the form. A book should be judged by its literary merit rather than the material on which it has been disseminated. Books finding their way to digital screens, as well as radically improving in form and function on the physical plane, means more variety for the reading public, and variety is the spice of life. It may burn the palate of some, but for the rest of us it is an essential ingredient for a satisfying experience.

The writer has worked as a producer in news media and an analyst in the NGO sector

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 3rd, 2017