Durability and constancy. You can't find these qualities on the Internet, in the finite life of my laptop, whose parts I am constantly replacing. The Internet cannot be carried into bed, to have its pages caressed by a finger or earmarked in the throes of feverish thought. It merely glows from a machine approaching obsolescence, flickering with phantoms from that utopian dream of technology.

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Ursula Le Guin in her essay �Staying Awake� from a 2008 issue of Harper�s:

"The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn�t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you are fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you�re reading a whole new book."

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