Binding

Wired's John C Abell says ebooks are not there yet because they can't be used for interior design:

Before you roll your eyes at the shallowness of this gripe, consider this: When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle?

It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don't keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.

Abell's comments reminded me of a 2010 study which aimed to gauge the effect of summer reading on students' academic performance. A philanthropist interviewed about the programme mentioned, albeit anecdotally, the importance of building a physical library:

For a study to be published in Reading Psychology, Richard Allington [a reading researcher at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville] and colleagues selected students in 17 high-poverty elementary schools in Florida and, for three consecutive years, gave each child 12 books, from a list the students provided, on the last day of school... Three years later, researchers found that those students who received books had "significantly higher" reading scores, experienced less of a summer slide and read more on their own each summer than the 478 who didn't get books.

Rebecca Constantino, [a researcher and instructor at the University of California-Irvine] who in 1999 founded Access Books, a group that has given away more than 1 million books, says the cause-and-effect is simple: "When kids own books, they get this sense, 'I'm a reader,' " she says. "It's very powerful when you go to a kid's home and ask him, 'Where is your library?'"

The full report of the study is here. (Pic: The Big Sleep. Based on the book.)