Treasures

It's ironic really, that on a day when the death of the schoolbook was being predicted _[1] I had just spent a good 2 hours searching through a resource online for something I could have found in 2 minutes if I'd only had the book.

Online resources are great for reading about cutting edge technology, up to the minute research, news, weather and opinions. They are cheap, well in fact free, if we have broadband and don't have to worry about the costs per minute of being online. Where they don't score well though, is in providing a familiar friend that we can thumb through over and over again, rereading sections that interest us, bookmarking pages and perhaps tucking away a postcard or other memento inside a particularly special volume. Even an online resource you've read before changes at the whim of the editor, so you might have put a particular page in your favourites list to return to at a later date, but it could have disappeared completely by the time you return to it months later.

All this perhaps goes to explain why my bookshelves are groaning. Some of the volumes are seventy or more years old. I might not look at these very often; they have no pretty pictures, but they are treasures. When I pick up a poetry book and read lines by John Masefield or W.H. Auden, I am truly transported back to another age, not just because of what is on the page, but because I can hear my mother reading out loud to me when I was very young. Will I ever be able to say that about a sheet printed off from the internet?

[1] Harvey, Mike and Woolcock, Nicola (10 June 2009) Schools may copy Arnold Schwarzenegger and junk their textbooks The Times, page 17 [online] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6466577.ece