Clickbait title: Why nothing will ever come close to text.

Is it cynical to praise your own medium or is it just practising what you preach? Everything which I will write here, will already have been said by experts in a more concise and constructive way.

The first mass medium

There are some clear material reasons why books became the first true mass medium (and for the same reasons architecture was the first mass medium before it). What I find fascinating is just how long they’ve stuck around. When we pick up a piece of paper, read a tagged wall or shuffle through pages, we are basically mimicking the consumption of like historical people, real historical people.

Progress would dictate that we throw out the old the moment something better has come along. Specialisation tampers that and makes sure we only do that if something really is superior in the same aspects as reading. And it hasn’t happened yet. So there must be something inherently unique about reading. And not just unique enough to fill a niche, unique enough to be surviving wars against trillion dollar supply chain magical devices.

Active vs Passive consumption

Consumption, depending on your definition, tends to carry the air of passivity within itself. It lives in this mirror world where it has become the de facto general term for a wide array of actions and a derogatory term for a specific kind of action that people is beneath them. I am using it in former sense. Consumption is ingestion, here of information.

Watching a movie is consumption. Listening to a song is consumption. Reading a book is consumption. And not all of it is created equal. Videos and music have the peculiar property of playing automatically. This makes them clear vectors for “passive consumption”. You don’t need to do anything. You don’t even need to pay attention (this blog article was written whilst listening to music, how much do you think I’ll remember?).

Reading simply does not admit this passivity vector (unless you ask your friend or pay Amazon to read it to you). The words on the page move exactly at the pace that you make your eyes move. Nobody can trick themselves they’ve read a book by just having turned the pages (don’t try prove me wrong with some ragebait, get off Tiktok instead). I classify reading as active consumption.

I’m busy reading

This is of course a bit terrifying/annoying depending on who you ask. What do you mean I cannot see how the story continues whilst I’m cleaning the house? Reading is not something you do on the side. You have to put in your hypothetical calendar that right now is “reading time” and nothing else.

This forces a certain focus on the media you consume. After every word in a novel, you can get up and ask yourself “What am I really spending my time on?”. To continue reading you need to eliminate doubt from your mind. And that might not be easy, especially if you’ve made bad experiences with reading in the past (school system!!).

Seeking for meaning can be difficult, but often the first step is searching for self-empowerment. People want to have the feeling that they are in charge of their life. And reading, having basically no barrier of entry (hah I wish! but this article assumes everyone it concerns can read fairly well) but still being an active choice, can mean that at least for a little bit in a day you decide what you spend your time on.

Connection through the page

But you see, books tend to be quite long. They don’t have to be, but at least in my cultural background, a book is a proper >100 pages paper thing, or at least a pdf that mimics the paper thing. Some ask an audience which is very aware of their choices to spend dozens of hours on a single thing, often written by a single person. Imagine someone showing up to your door and asking if you’re ready for a 40 hour conversation over the next several weeks.

Phrasing it like this, with the sensibilities that we have in life about maximising efficiency and (supposed!) attention span deficits, it seems like a modern miracle anyone reads anymore (or ever did!). Isn’t it beautiful that so many people do?

It really is mind-bending to me just how deep you can pierce into an author’s work if you just give it those 40 hours. And the fact that authors perform the act of opening up their soul for 40 hours. Thank you, authors. Not because I like reading some of your books (although I do!), but because it is simply a Herculean effort to do this.

Condemnation

So here’s the part where I obviously have to talk about how our society has artificially elevated the act of reading as something holy. That there are too many bad books and too many lazy people pretending to read books.

But here’s the thing. Books are sort of uncompromising in you needing to engage with them. Even the worst self-help slop still needs to find a way to fill 200 pages (LLMs undercut this point a bit). Every conspiracy theorist who spouts self-referential nothing in a self-published book had to sit there for evening after evening. Some of their soul gets left on the page.

It is of course not a new idea that even bad media is useful at revealing the creator’s sensibilities. Every formulaic copy-pasted thing carries the stench of copy-cat interpreting the value of the copied object. What sets books apart in my mind is just how accessible, free-form, long and self-contained they tend to be. It all has to be words at the end, but those words can be anything.

The fact that books can be bad is worth celebration. Because if they have flaws, those flaws tend to be openly naked. The words have no background track or flashy visuals to hide. The fact that books can be good is beautiful. You’re telling me you can hand me a piece of scribbled paper and it can make me cry? Does it not show how concerned we are with meaning?