What is a book?

A book is a house. The covers are the roof. The spine is the internal structure that holds the house together. A book is a physical structure, technically speaking. However, if a book is a house, then it can also be a home. The characters roam throughout the book like inhabitants throughout a home. A house is a physical object, but a home is a living, breathing idea. In a book, characters can do anything, they live their lives on the pages in between the covers of the book. Likewise, the members of a family in any particular home fulfill their own personal adventures while living out of their house.

There is something to be said about the physical structure that is a book. The coarse fibers of a page running against your thumb as you flip the page, the weight of the book in your hand as you level it onto an adjacent nightstand, a book's physical presence cannot be understated, and is therefore necessary to take in the story in completion. An author does not type hundreds of pages only to see them condensed into a mere drop of data floating in an infinite cyberspace. An illustrator does not spend hours tediously stenciling out a perfect design only to see it simplified into a basic geometric image, whose quality rivals that of the Paint program. E-Readers, while convenient, destroys the very passion that allows a book to breathe and become a living symbol. Would Gatsby have become a cultural phenomenon had it been confined to applications of a digital device? How clearly could we understand the statements of racism and prejudice present in To Kill A Mockingbird had we read it on computerized screen. Surely the effect would have been lost. Without the physical facets, a story cannot become house. And without a house one cannot have a proper home. The ideas of the text are weakened and experienced only in a diluted and forgettable fashion.

In "Scribble" by Victor LaValle, he makes the argument that books are like toasters: mass produced and therefore void of individual beauty and divinity. My belief that books are like houses both agrees and disagrees with this perspective. Yes, books are mass-produced (as are homes) and therefore there exist a countless number of copies. Housing developers often use the same design and/or structure when building houses, however, each house (and book) will never be exactly the same. How is this possible, you ask? Simple. While the physical aspects are the same, each object goes through a different journey. Identical houses lived in by different families will inherently become very different homes. Just as books owned by different people will become different. There is an endearing and vitalizing power to the footnotes on the pages, the slight wrinkles where the book has been bent, and the loving note from a family member if the book as given as a gift. These countless iterations give each book a unique identity, an identity that can never be achieved by the artificial interface of an E-Reader.