[Sigh] No, the Kindle is NOT Going to Destroy Books

I keep hearing this hysteria popping up over and over. "Now that we have e-books, books are dead! Game over, man, game over! Oh the humanity!" Conversely, I also hear this weird false dichotomy, all-or-nothing approach from book purists. "I still like print books! That's why I'll never get a Nook!"

People. Hear me out now, because Mama's only going to say this once (okay, that's a damn lie and I admit it; I'll say it every chance I get, and I will forget I said it to you and repeat myself endlessly, like a broken record). If you buy an e-book reader, or receive one for some pagan gift-giving holiday, it does not mean you have to take all your books out to the backyard and burn them. You're not limited to choosing one method of reading for the rest of your life. You can buy your hardcovers and your paperbacks and sit by the fire smoking your pipe and read them...and when you go on a long trip with limited suitcase space, you're allowed to take your Kindle. You really won't be forced to pick one and declare an allegiance, I swear.

And I know that there's still a fear out there. That if you buy an eBook reader, you'll be endorsing the fall of books, voting with your wallet, so to speak. That you'll be mistaken for one of those people who just wants the ease and convenience of a download, and doesn't appreciate tradition, or heritage, or even new book smell. By gum, you'll be a digital person, a fast-paced, jet-setting hipster with no patience, and no appreciation for history! You might even forget how to cook! You might wake up one day and find yourself on the Google! The horror!

Do not fear. Using an e-book reader does not mean you will start viewing books as ironic, archaic tchotchkes.

But what about CDs?! Electronic music downloads on them Internets have killed the CD already! How long before electronic text downloads kill our books?!

This is really a valid question, one I'd like to address at greater length and lesser sarcasm. Yep, the whole CD thing is pretty well over, IMO, and yes, it is largely thanks to the easy availability of downloadable music. But this is very different from the relationship between books and e-books.

The goal of both CDs and MP3/MP4 downloads is the information itself. You want to listen to the music they contain. The CD does not really offer many benefits that the download doesn't have, and it comes with a lot of additional drawbacks. Yes, you have a physical copy of your music, which you can use as a backup in the event of terminal hard drive failure. But that's nothing you can't circumvent by simply making backup copies of your downloaded music on writable CDs, or even on a portable hard drive. And those bulk packs of CD-Rs cost a lot less than a CD album. The CD album also may come with tracks you don't like, and will never listen to, so the net average cost of the tracks you do want, and will listen to, becomes much higher. $15 for an album where you'll listen to 10 out of 15 tracks? $1.50 per song that you'll actually use. Even if you pay for music via Amazon or iTunes, you could get those 10 tracks for $10 at 99 cents each, and save yourself $5 plus a trip to the CD store. Downloads offer instant delivery of exactly the information you require, at a lower price and they're never out of stock.

So how does this differ from a book? You're after the information it contains, right? Well, yes and no. See, books serve more purposes than just a delivery system for information. As the book-smell fetishists will tell you, a book is sold as an experience as well as a body of information. Books are decorative, if nothing else. They fill a shelf and create an atmosphere in a home library. And they come in many levels of decorativeness--you can have that dog-eared copy of The Hobbit on your shelf and it'll do ya fine...but you can also have that over-sized, leather-bound, gold-leafed special edition with the thick, creamy pages. And that offers a truly different experience. Books appeal to the visual and tactile sensibilities in a way that CDs were never designed to.

If anything, books are much more like vinyl records, which are seeing an upsurge in popularity, even (perhaps especially) among younger audiences who did not even grow up in the era of vinyl's original popularity. Vinyl albums were, and are, marketed as an experience as well as an information medium. Vinyl offers the experience of hearing music in analog format; it offers collectability; it features album art on a scale that merits display, and therefore fulfills the visual aesthetic and decorative impulse. CD album art is of a scale and nature that leans more towards the disposable.

Book purists do have a solid point. But it's not that one format is superior to another; it's simply that books do serve a purpose, and appeal to a market, that e-books can't overtake. Yes, we will see drops in paper book sales. But books aren't going to disappear any time soon.