Quote:
Originally Posted by bill_mchale
I think ultimately, the whole point of the blog excerpt is that there is something intangible about a paper book... at least for the poster. There are people who love books for the content within them; for us, the transition to ebooks is an easy one. Then there are those who love books for being books; for them there is far more to love about books than simply their content. This guy clearly falls into the latter category.
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Bill
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Walter Benjamin called that intangible 'aura' (or 'auratic experience'), referring specifically to pre-gutenberg books, to paintings/sculptures/anything-not-mass-producible; something that was due to a work of art which it had because of its exclusivity. Of course, after reproducible works became the norm (along with repros of paintings etc), people started valuing other aspects about a work than the fact that you could only get a "I-can-see-this-work-only-while-and-when-I'm-here" experience from
experiencing the work. (An attempt is still being made by some of the sillier people to collect, say, first editions of works, but to me that's mostly a misguided rear-guard.)
The point being, in any case, that collecting books is different from reading them (this applies to other works of art as well, just not as readily, as it's quite a bit easier to enjoy a painting you own than a book; as well as applying to other things-you-can-collect, though those collections don't quite have the same amount of cachet).. It's a bit harder to say "gee, I own these specific 1432kB of epub file, which means I've got myself a neatly formatted edition of the Pevear&Volokhonsky translation of the
Brothers Karamazov, than it is to say the same about the hardcover; mostly because nobody will believe you when you say the two are of equal value. This, I am quite sure, will some day change, though I have to admit I find it hard to be quite as certain/'proud' of the fact I
own it, as the ebook edition is quite a bit less tangible than the hardcover I have on my shelf.
Anyway, the point I was hoping to make is that value (or social capital) is something quite dependent on community standards (something Benjamin never quite made explicit when talking about aura), but as such, it will need to be recognized as valuable before it will be accepted as such.
In other words: Be patient
