When I studied architecture, I had two drawing instructors that used to insist we use wooden pencils. Their regular mantra was, "Feel the warmth of the wood!" However, being that I had been drawing with mechanical pencils for years previous, I was fortunately able to resist their programming and work with the tools I preferred.
When I hear everyone talking about the "sensual" experience of reading, I just shrug. To me, the story is all... and when I'm reading a good story, I'm not thinking about what I'm reading it from....
By the way, J.D... have you ever tasted a good spine? With a little basil, dill, and oregano, it's divine...
*sigh* Look ... I did not say this was for everyone. I simply disagreed with Steve's comment that the words are all that there is to the experience; and for quite a few people, that is very much the case. If you've never felt it, you've never felt it. If you have, you know what I'm talking about. As far as the smell of a book ... well, when you first open the thing, before you become absorbed in the text itself, each book has an odor of its own, and that odor can be freighted with memories of your own, or it can call up imaginative associations of the history of the book, of the people who have owned it through the ages, etc. ... all of which can act as a marvelous prelude to the experience of the stories (or essays, or what-have-you) which you will soon be reading ... very much like the bouquet on a fine wine can get prepare the palate for a superb vintage. The weight, the texture, the browning or yellowing of the pages ... all of that can contribute to the experience. And when reading it, the manner of type (for example, modern, rather angular typefaces as opposed to older, more rounded, or even gothic typeface, use of the "long s", etc., adds to the flavour of the book, and can itself spur the imagination to take me places, that the book speaks of, as well. When I read, I experience what I read, to a great degree, the way one does when one recalls a memory ... I may not feel it as intensely (as an example, when Sophie gets her foot caught between the rocks in Wyndham's "The Chrysalids", I'm not going to have the same level of pain she is having with that sprained ankle, but I may well suffer a sympathetic twinge or two), but I do experience something of that. If I read Dr. Johnson's
Rambler in that 1796 edition, with the "long s" and the marbled endpapers and that slowly browning paper, I get a feeling of going back through time and being an unseen observer listening to the Good Doctor expressing his thoughts ... it can even aid, if one has some knowledge of the differences in speech patterns, to "hear", in the mind, the differences in pronunciation and accent of the time. Smell, especially, is one of our keenest senses, and ties to our memory intensely, calling up memories and images long-forgotten ... and books can trigger that. Reading things on electronic media simply cannot.
As I said, there's nothing wrong with them, and they are wonderful for having the information in a small, compact space, portable and useful, and for those who enjoy them, more power to you. But for me, they can never replace the experience I receive when I read one of these books that are steeped in history, and have been handed from one person to another for sometimes centuries. I have, for instance, an edition of Julian Hawthorne's "Lock and Key Library", the 10-volume set that he put together, published in 1909. Not only do I enjoy the stories there, but I also have the added association that this is the very edition, the very printing, which H. P. Lovecraft used when doing research for his essay
Supernatural Horror in Literature. Again, that sort of thing is simply something I could never have from any of these on electronic media. Some of the books I have bear inscriptions from a quill pen ... some have marginal notes by previous readers, including a handful by writers who have owned the books, and these can often give me new ways of looking at what I'm reading that I may not have thought of myself, thus adding a new dimension to my experience.
There are simply so many, many things that a print book has that electronic versions simply don't, and likely never will. That is not to put them down. That is simply to say that it really is quite valid to say that there are just some aspects to having the books that the other can never replace, and those are indeed a part of the reading experience as well.
Oh, and as for your comments about a spine ... "a good wine needs no bush".
