Should we ‘get over' print books in the digital age – or are they more precious than ever?

Ebooks have been popular for decades and audiobooks are increasingly so. But physical books are still the decided favourite: a survey of Australian publishers after last Christmas reported print books made up a comfortable majority of sales (ebooks were 4–18 per cent and audiobooks 5–15 per cent). This is despite regular warnings about the death of the book. Some critics of print books have even changed their tune.

“We need to get over books,” wrote journalist Jeff Jarvis in a 2009 book calling for them to be digitised. “I recant,” he wrote in the Atlantic nearly 15 years later, in 2023. Some readers like a print book's sensory qualities: its feel and smell. For others, there is satisfaction in assembling a book collection.

Like vinyl records, sales of which are also healthy, print books can be collected as valued objects to be cherished. Collections, and individual special books, can be admired, shared and displayed, in homes and on social media. Books are used to communicate taste and class, from celebrity book clubs to a current trend for sharing lovingly annotated books on social media.

Books signify reverence for culture – and bring it into domestic, accessible spaces. Earlier this year, Books and Publishing reported on a rise in “luxury” special editions of already published books. Romance author and academic Jodi McAlister calls them “a romanticisation of the physical object of the book”.

Print books in particular are carriers of history, knowledge and shared stories – as I'm learning through an ongoing joint research project into community publishing in regional Australia. And widespread horror at the destruction of books and libraries in Ukraine and Gaza reflects our collective knowledge that they represent culture itself.

Preserving community stories

With Alexandra Dane, Sandra Phillips and Kim Wilkins, I interviewed 27 self-published authors. Most of them wanted to create a physical book, rather than an ebook. For these authors, publishing a print book was important because it created a tangible record. Our research showed people instinctively turned to the print format as the best way to preserve their memories and histories, and share these with other people in their communities.

For example, we interviewed Sonya Bradley-Shoyer from Burdekin, north Queensland, who self-published her poetry collection Come … Walk With Me in 2024 as a print book with multiple photographs and illustrations.

Bradley-Shoyer writes her poetry on a tablet, but was drawn to publishing in print format to ensure her poems had a secure home. “People would say, Sonya, you really need to put them in a book so you have them there for future,” she reflected, “I used to give them a thumbs up, yep, yep, because I knew it was much harder.” It took her “a number of years” to produce her book. Print allows books to circulate visibly in a community.

Another author we interviewed, Christine Adams, has written a number of books relating to the history of Broken Hill, and her books have been sold at local venues including the Broken Hill fire station and the tourist information centre. Adams sees her books as preserving cultural heritage and local stories, telling us what she does is “all for a love of the city”.

Several of the self-published authors quoted in our project's DIY Publishing Toolkit also make this point. George Venables, a Burdekin-based author, spoke to us about publishing an anthology with his local writers' group. He told us, “People can have it on their coffee table and say, oh I've got it, he's autographed it for me.”

Making a print book is meaningful for young writers. Jane Vaughan is a bookseller at Big Sky Stories in Broken Hill, where she ran a series of workshops for young people culminating in the publication of an anthology of stories. Jane spoke to us about how meaningful the book launch was: “when they had that book, and they were walking around going, This is mine, this is mine. Mine's on this page.”

That value, of a book being shared in a community, also came through in our conversation with Olivia Nigro from Running Water Community Press, an author-run publisher in Alice Springs focusing on First Nations storytelling and copyright justice. Olivia told us about the Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women's Talk poetry collection, which they published in 2020 (under their former name Ptilotus Press, and reprinted in 2021). “Having it as a tangible paperback format, for people to hold and read and carry with them where they go is really important.”

Destruction of books

The physical objects of books are meaningful; so, too, is their loss. Last year, I found myself standing next to The Empty Library. This monument in the Bebelplatz square in Berlin is simple, but powerful.

(Author is from University of Melbourne)