Source: The Daily Progress By Bryan McKenzie

Two people sitting on the beach reading Harold Robbins’ “The Betsy,” one on an electronic reader and the other with a paperback, may be reading the same book, but they are having totally different experiences.

“The physical part of the reading experience — the paper, the cover, the reviews, the suntan lotion that spills on the pages — are all part of the reading experience,” said Michael F. Suarez, director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. “A week, a month, a year from now, if you see that paperback on the bookshelf, all of the memories are going to come back to you. It becomes an artifact and part of your humanistic experience.”

Suarez told a Virginia Festival of the Book audience on Wednesday that digitalizing books may preserve linguistic codes, but that other aspects of a book disappear.

“We spend so much time talking about the gain from digitalization that we don’t talk about the loss,” he said. “We think of books as linguistic code, language, but it’s more than that. Digitalization preserves linguistic code but it does nothing to preserve the humanistic aspects of a book.”

Suarez made his comments at the University of Virginia’s Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections auditorium as part of the weeklong Festival of the Book. Events at the festival run through Sunday afternoon and feature dozens of events as different venues. A complete schedule is available at www.vabook.org.

Suarez noted that universities have made an effort to reproduce rare books in digital format and offer them online. He said studies have shown that students often prefer the electronic version to actual inspection of the book itself, even when the book is nearby.

“If you look at a digitalization of a painting, you really don’t know what you’re missing unless you have seen that painting in person,” Suarez said. “That is the same case with a book.”

Books represent a community effort to produce a cultural artifact, Suarez said. An author creates a manuscript and the publishing process — the interaction between proofreaders, editors, and designers — creates a book’s final form. Choices of paper, type size, binding and hardback or paperback, reflect the intended market for the book.

“If you see a man who has lost his shirt and is wearing trousers and he’s sort of brawny and he’s holding a woman who seems to be about to fall out of her ball gown and behind them is a plantation burning, you have a good idea of what that book is about and who it’s intended for,” Suarez told the festival audience. “You
Suarez said he is not opposed to digital books. He is, however, opposed to marginalization of the real thing.

“If you’re on an airplane, a Kindle is convenient because you can take hundreds of manuscripts with you to read. Digitalization makes the text available to more people, but it cannot provide the full experience of a book,” he said. “A digital book is not a book at all.”

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