Remember that time in the 2000s when publishers and book-sellers kept pushing us to buy digital e-books instead of physical books made of paper? I do. They claimed that e-books were SO MUCH BETTER than paper books.
E-books made their appearance during the late 1990s. Some forward-thinking online book-sellers realized that computers were an untapped resource for the publishing industry. If people could download Windows 95 or Encarta Encyclopedia (remember that?) onto their computer, then why couldn’t they download books too? So, downloadable manuscripts started popping up in the late 1990s. In fact, I actually have a commercial on an old VHS tape which I taped off my TV back in May 2000 which heralds e-books as a source of unlimited academic and literary potential: “E-Books. Boundless books, boundless possibilities”. Some people took advantage of this, but it wouldn’t be for nearly another decade that e-books started to surge in popularity, and it all had to do with some really manipulative marketing.
During the renewed wave of environmentalism which dominated the middle 2000s, we were told that buying paper books was bad because we cut down acre upon acre of trees to grind the woodpulp into paper. E-books, by contrast, didn’t need paper. Therefore, you’d be saving the forest, and you’d be doing a small part in the fight against pollution and global warming.
They claimed that e-books took up less physical space than paper books. Paper books took up far too much room on your shelves and in your closets, whereas a single electronic device like a Kindle, Nook, or iPad could store literally hundreds of books on it. In an age when minimalism was a growing fad, this was like music to our ears. Books are clutter. Clutter is bad. Ergo, books are bad.
They claimed that books degrade over time. The paper turns yellow and brittle, pages tear, pages fall out, books rot, books smell, etc., etc. Books need to be tenderly cared for. No need to worry about that with e-books. Just click the “download” button, and a hundred years from now it will be just as fresh and crisp as the day you got it.
They claimed that e-books were far cheaper than physical books. Real books are labor intensive to manufacture, and labor costs money. Printers, binders, distributers, all of these cogs in the publishing machine need to be paid a salary. E-books skipped all of that, downloading the books directly from the publisher to your phone or iPad or whatever. For those who wanted to be economical, especially after the stock market crash of 2008 when everybody was trying to get the most amount of mileage out of every penny, e-books seemed like a sensible option.
The result? From the middle 2000s onwards, e-book sales soared, far outpacing the sales of physical books. In fact, many book stores closed their doors in the years which followed. True, these closures occurred for a variety of reasons, but one part of it was that very few people wanted to buy paper books. Everything was on your phone now. E-books were the in-thing. Paper books were a relic of the past. Get with the program and join the 21st Century like the rest of us.
But then in the 2020s, the pendulum started to swing the other way. In March 2020, humanity went into lockdown mode as the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the world. Hundreds of millions of people got very sick very quickly, and it’s estimated that over 7 million died from the highly contagious virus. Not as bad as the Black Death of the Middle Ages, or the smallpox epidemics which obliterated millions upon millions in the New World, or the Spanish Flu of the early 1900s, but still pretty damn bad. “Isolation” and “social distancing” became the new buzzwords. With everyone shuttered up in their homes and with little to do to occupy themselves, reading quickly became a way to pass the time. And with so many people on their tablets, or iPads, or whatever, here is where people started noticing the flaws with e-books.
An e-book relies on a particular device to view it, and that device has to be in proper working order. What if your device malfunctions and stops working? What if your batteries die and you don’t have any replacements? Well, then you’re staring at a black screen. Having a physical paper book which was ready-to-hand which you could read at any time without needing a special device to view it became more and more appealing. For these reasons, some people started to buy both an e-book and a physical book of the same title, just in case. Sales of paper books began to increase.
Some tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorists began sounding the alarm that surveillance agencies were accessing your online e-libraries to see what kind of books you were reading. Others said that hackers were accessing your electronic devices to see what you were looking at. Buying a physical book, by contrast, was hacker-proof.
But the biggest punch to readers’ guts came in the mid 2020s, and it began not with the book publishing industry, but with the game industry. In the past, computer games or console games were sold in physical form – either CDs or cartridges – which you had to insert into your computer’s CD-ROM drive or your game console in order to play. However, in the 2010s, more and more companies started switching over to games that you could download from a website, the biggest example of which is Steam which quickly dominated the gamer market. Most people had no problem with this, but for those who grew up in the 1990s and had experience with download sites like Napster and Limewire, the latter of which was prone to glitches and viruses, the idea of having to download a game from a website felt a little iffy. Still, those cautious skeptics were a minority. By the beginning of the 2020s, barely any physical games were sold anymore; nearly all games had to be purchased as downloads from Steam or elsewhere. In July 2026, Sony announced that it would stop manufacturing physical games by the beginning of 2028, an announcement which caught a lot of people off-guard. It seemed like slotting in your CD to play “Battlefield 1942” or “Age of Empires” would no longer be an option in the near future. If you wanted to play a game, then you had no choice but to bite the bullet and give yet more money to Steam.
And then the bottom finally fell out.
Gamers were shocked to learn that many of the games which they downloaded suddenly weren’t there anymore. They just disappeared! What happened? It turns out that the service provider literally snatched the game back! Accessing the game was blocked, and it wouldn’t be unblocked until you paid them a renewed fee, either monthly or annual, to access it. The internet exploded with rage as gamers grabbed their torches and pitchforks and screamed and cursed at how corporate profit-obsessed game companies were trying to squeeze the most amount of money out of their customers by basically holding their games hostage, games which they already paid for! Games which they owned! Ah, but you see, there’s the thing. The gaming companies claimed that the customers who bought these online games actually didn’t own them – they paid a license fee to the service provider which granted them permission to play. You don’t pay, you don’t play. Moreover, the license could be revoked or rescinded at any time, regardless of whether you paid or not. Understandably, gamers were pissed. “Bring back physical media!!!” more and more gamers started shouting.
And it wasn’t just the game industry which caught flak for this. Very quickly, the publishing industry also came within the angry public’s cross-hairs. People were perplexed and angered when books that they downloaded mysteriously disappeared from their e-library. They were afterwards shocked to learn that they didn’t actually own the book which they downloaded – they were merely loaned it, and the bookseller could revoke that loan at any time for any reason or for no reason at all. It was even mooted that some would charge subscription fees which you’d be obliged to pay each year to the service provider in order to read a book, like paying for a phone, or a TV, or internet. Now you’d have to pay a monthly fee to read.
And for many people, that was the last straw.
From 2025 onwards, there was an ever-growing push to shun e-books and go back to buying physical books made from paper. This cry has only gotten louder in 2026 as people got more and more fed up with modern technology and modern life in general. “Bring back analog!” became the battle cry amongst those who were disaffected with modern life and its obsession to make everything “smart”, with subscription services, with incompetent customer service workers, and with commercials and ads being shoved into our face every two or three minutes. Physical paper books harkened back to a simpler, slower, easier time, a time when technology was a luxury instead of a life necessity, a time when people were or at least seemed smarter and more capable, a time when products were crafted with love and care rather than pumping out a landslide of mediocre products as quickly as possible, a time when corporations seemed less unashamedly greedy for profit.
So, by and by, more and more people began drifting back to the book store. Yes, paper books cost more money. Yes, they took up more space in your home. Yes, they needed to be taken care of. But damn it, they were theirs to own permanently! Computer hackers cannot hack paper books. You didn’t need a special device to read it. You didn’t need to make sure the batteries were fully charged. You didn’t need to worry that your service provider might deny access to your book or even delete the book entirely unless you agree to their terms and pay a license fee. You can’t delete a real physical paper book. The only way you can get rid of one is if you physically destroy it. And you sure as Hell don’t need to pay a monthly fee to Amazon or Barnes & Noble to read a paper book. Once you buy it, you own it, for good, no questions asked, no ifs, ands, or buts.
So, if you want to stick it to Big Tech, go buy a damn book.
Categories: History, Uncategorized
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