The print book, unlike the cassette or the vinyl record, turns out to be surprisingly durable. Many publishing insiders agreed with Dr Negroponte as recently as 2012, when e-books were the fastest growing segment in the publishing industry - consumer e-book sales went up by 366 per cent in the United Kingdom as print book sales shrank. Even then, Forbes' Jeremy Greenfield sounded a note of caution in mid-2013: don't lose focus on print, he warned, pointing out that bookstores remained a better book delivery system than "a Twitter account and a prayer'. E-book evangelists are up against a durable, malleable, versatile 2,000-year-old technology called paper. The physical book has been around in one form or another for that long, even if the printed book is a relatively more recent innovation. This is why comparisons with cassettes or vinyl records are dubious - paper, in manuscript, papyrus, folio or book form, has a much older lineage.
And yet, it is not merely nostalgia that keeps the printed book alive. Consider market realities. As observers who have read the fine print have pointed out, it's the e-book sales of the Big Six trade publishing firms that have dropped, in part because of industry agreements that have, controversially, held e-book prices close to printed books. Readers who today pay the small extra premium for the pleasure of a book they can hold might not be so attached to paper if publishers allowed e-book prices to drop to more realistic levels. E-book sales are challenged in India for another reason: not many buy Kindles and other e-readers. Few of those who read documents or web pages on smartphones would consider reading a whole book on those small screens. And industry reports from the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe point to another interesting phenomenon - e-book sales are down for mainstream publishing, but they're growing for self-published books.
Survey after survey shows that 13-17 year old readers in the US and the UK prefer print, or a 'print-like' experience - ruling out nostalgia, unlikely for a generation that grew up texting and taking selfies. But there is another argument for the durability of printed books, and the refusal of readers to give up the seductions of crisp cream paper, pages that you can flip through, tactile book jacket covers, welcoming stacks of books by the bedside. In a 2013 article in Scientific American, Ferris Jabr rounded up scientific opinion that explained why the tactile experience of reading on paper is so crucial to readers - e-books may be portable and eco-friendly, but most readers agree that their practicality cannot compensate for the pleasures of the printed page. It seems the brain may respond to text as a physical landscape; readers recall information (and favourite passages) better when they can see it on the page, flip through the "topological landscape" of the paper book. The study explains the reader's reluctance to abandon paper for screen, despite the possibilities of hyperlinks, interactive articles et al. It can be read online - but many may want to print it out.