Why books are here to stay Small Thing Big Idea a TED series
Transcriber: TED Translators admin
Reviewer: Krystian Aparta
I will lend books to people,
but of course, the rule is
“Don’t do that unless you never
intend to see that book again.”
[Small thing.]
[Big idea.]
The physical object of a book
is almost like a person.
I mean, it has a spine
and it has a backbone.
It has a face.
Actually, it can sort of be your friend.
Books record the basic human experience
like no other medium can.
Before there were books,
ancient civilizations would record things
by notches on bones
or rocks or what have you.
The first books as we know them
originated in ancient Rome.
We go by a term called the codex,
where they would have
two heavy pieces of wood
which become the cover,
and then the pages in between
would then be stitched along one side
to make something that was relatively
easily transportable.
They all had to completely
be done by hand,
which became the work
of what we know as a scribe.
And frankly, they were luxury items.
And then a printer
named Johannes Gutenberg,
in the mid-fifteenth century,
created the means to mass-produce a book,
the modern printing press.
It wasn’t until then
that there was any kind of consumption
of books by a large audience.
Book covers started to come into use
in the early nineteenth century,
and they were called dust wrappers.
They usually had advertising on them.
So people would take them off
and throw them away.
It wasn’t until the turn of the nineteenth
into the twentieth century
that book jackets could be seen
as interesting design
in and of themselves.
Such that I look at that and I think,
“I want to read that.
That interests me.”
The physical book itself represents
both a technological advance
but also a piece of technology
in and of itself.
It delivered a user interface
that was unlike anything
that people had before.
And you could argue
that it’s still the best way
to deliver that to an audience.
I believe that the core purpose
of a physical book
is to record our existence
and to leave it behind
on a shelf, in a library, in a home,
for generations down the road
to understand where they came from,
that people went through
some of the same things
that they’re going through,
and it’s like a dialogue
that you have with the author.
I think you have a much more human
relationship to a printed book
than you do to one that’s on a screen.
People want the experience of holding it,
of turning the page,
of marking their progress in a story.
And then you have, of all things,
the smell of a book.
Fresh ink on paper
or the aging paper smell.
You don’t really get that
from anything else.
The book itself, you know,
can’t be turned off with a switch.
It’s a story that you can
hold in your hand
and carry around with you
and that’s part of what makes
them so valuable,
and I think will make them valuable
for the duration.
A shelf of books, frankly,
is made to outlast you, (Laughs)
no matter who you are.