Long live the paper books!

"Book Age is over!". "It's the end of Gutenberg's Galaxy'". "Nobody reads paper books nowadays". "In the future, there will be only reading on digital devices".

How many times have you heard/read claims like these?

I've been thinking a lot about reading, mainly printed books reading (after all, it's a pivotal part of my current job). Some weeks ago, I was searching for a few images of people with books in their hands and I found beautiful pictures in a BBC report (signed by Fionna Macdonald), Striking photos of readers around the world. 

The article highlights On Reading, a photographer Steve McCurry's book, which gathers pictures that were taken over past 40 years; some of them, according to Macdonald, are "glimpses of people absorbed in the written word, many unaware they were being photographed".

Take a look at this:

The photo was taken at a museum (Umbria, Italy). I think the enormous skeleton legs belong to the sculpture named Calamita Cosmica, created by Gino De Dominicis. But the woman doesn't seem interested in it. Maybe she's an employee of the museum. Maybe she's seen that sculpture hundreds and hundreds of times and - meh - it isn't so fascinating anymore. Who knows? What is she reading? A catalogue? The picture whets our curiosity (it's irresistible, isn't it?).

And what about this one?

It was taken in 2013. The kid is a member of the Suri Tribe (Tulget, Omo Valley, Ethiopia). It looks like he's at school. Why is he alone? Is he doing a difficult task or just reading for fun?

The next one is odd and thrilling:

What is this facility? Looks like a power plant. The photo (taken in 1991, in Kuwait, i.e. after or even during the Gulf War) shows a man, surrounded by rubble, focused on a simple book!

We couldn't forget my country, could we?

This stunning library is the Real Gabinete Português de Leitura (Royal Portuguese Cabinet for Reading), founded in 1837 (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and still working today.

Journalist/blogger Maria Popova, going into the German writer Hermann Hesse's essay The Magic of the Book, wrote:

"The question of what books do and what they are for is, of course, an abiding one. For Kafka, books were “the axe for the frozen sea within us”; for Carl Sagan, “proof that humans are capable of working magic”; for James Baldwin, a way to change our destiny; for Neil Gaiman, the vehicle for the deepest human truths; for Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, our ultimate frontier of freedom. Falling closest to Galileo, who saw reading as a way of having superhuman powers, Hesse considers the historical role of the written word: 

'With all peoples the word and writing are holy and magical; naming and writing were originally magical operations, magical conquests of nature through the spirit, and everywhere the gift of writing was thought to be of divine origin. With most peoples, writing and reading were secret and holy arts reserved for the priesthood alone.

[…]

Today all this is apparently completely changed. Today, so it seems, the world of writing and of the intellect is open to everyone… Today, so it seems, being able to read and write is little more than being able to breathe… Writing and the book have apparently been divested of every special dignity, every enchantment, every magic… From a liberal, democratic point of view, this is progress and is accepted as a matter of course; from other points of view, however, it is a devaluation and vulgarization of the spirit'.

All those authors and I are on the same page.

One more thing: Paper books are not a thing of the past. They are still required. Long live the paper books!