“Maybe it’s an effect of living your life online — that you also want these physical things,” he said.
As a former Amazon book editor, married to another Amazon book editor, I can verify: We love books. Made of paper. On shelves all over our house.
What we’ve lost are the unbeautiful books—the trade paper sci-if, the cheap vacation reads, the business guides, the junky nonfiction. Those are consumed by us, in lines or on airplanes, and are one less thing to sell at Powell’s. But the beautiful books and the practical books—ones we visit over and over—remain in our lives.
Funny to think that this is a surprise to the New York Times—that you can love the digital and the tangible all at once.