As society continues to modernize and work toward achieving a sustainable environment, the question of whether or not to abandon paper books is a relevant one. This has led to conversations about what value paper books offer. One camp argues paper books are necessary to preserve history given digital media’s impermanence. Others say a balance of e-books and paper books can be optimized to suit our needs.

Proctor: Keep paper books around, please

Schools, including colleges like UO, should keep paper books around for archival and study reasons. Something about reading words on a screen makes it harder for them to stick, probably because there’s no muscle memory or touch involved.

For millennia, man has decided to put words on pieces of paper, which is basically reeds and wood smushed together and dyed white. For a while they did it on clay tablets, which may have looked cool but could break. So, we’ve put the words on pieces of paper. And little fragments of these pieces of paper have survived to the present day — take, for instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which allow us to see the early influences behind the Bible.

The biggest reason why society as a whole should keep paper books around is because of the fact that digital information doesn’t last forever. What happens when civilization collapses, and the internet and cellular networks shut down? When the e-book hosting websites no longer function? Future archeologists looking back would be unable to see the remnants and information left by our culture during the time we used the internet as our primary source of communication. There wouldn’t be any paper fragments left to find, aside from the occasional scraps of a Michelle Obama book. Hence, we should keep paper books around as a way to preserve records, data and history for future generations.

O’Leary: Paper books and e-books can coexist

I love books. I love the tactile experience, reading marginalia and loaning my favorite copies to friends. But what I really love about books are the stories they hold. I’ll read anything: Sci-fi, horror, history, philosophy, you name it. That love of stories leads me not to cut off e-books just because I’m not used to their format.

I learned to appreciate e-books last summer when I didn’t have one. My job entailed going for weeks at a time without access to bookstores or the internet. I simply couldn’t pack as many books as I could read. I flew through the few books I had brought and then had to resort to borrowing from colleagues. Some of the books they loaned me were great. Some weren’t. Overall, I would have been happier with my own curated collection.

The greatest advantage of e-books, like all electronics, is convenience. Being able to carry hundreds of books in a package the size of a Junie B. Jones paperback is hard to beat. There are also environmental advantages to not printing on trees and transporting them cross country. Further, e-books have user-friendly features like being able to search an entire text at the press of a button rather than trying to remember the page where that particularly impactful passage was.

I don’t think e-books can or should ever replace paper books. I just think they both have advantages, and any lover of stories should take advantage of both.