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Transcriber: TED Translators admin Reviewer: Krystian Aparta
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I will lend books to people, but of course, the rule is
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"Don't do that unless you never intend to see that book again."
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[Small thing.]
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[Big idea.]
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The physical object of a book is almost like a person.
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I mean, it has a spine and it has a backbone.
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It has a face.
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Actually, it can sort of be your friend.
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Books record the basic human experience
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like no other medium can.
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Before there were books,
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ancient civilizations would record things
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by notches on bones or rocks or what have you.
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The first books as we know them originated in ancient Rome.
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We go by a term called the codex,
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where they would have two heavy pieces of wood
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which become the cover,
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and then the pages in between would then be stitched along one side
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to make something that was relatively easily transportable.
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They all had to completely be done by hand,
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which became the work of what we know as a scribe.
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And frankly, they were luxury items.
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And then a printer named Johannes Gutenberg,
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in the mid-fifteenth century, created the means to mass-produce a book,
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the modern printing press.
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It wasn't until then
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that there was any kind of consumption of books by a large audience.
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Book covers started to come into use in the early nineteenth century,
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and they were called dust wrappers.
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They usually had advertising on them.
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So people would take them off and throw them away.
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It wasn't until the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century
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that book jackets could be seen as interesting design
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in and of themselves.
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Such that I look at that and I think,
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"I want to read that.
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That interests me."
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The physical book itself represents both a technological advance
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but also a piece of technology in and of itself.
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It delivered a user interface
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that was unlike anything that people had before.
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And you could argue that it's still the best way
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to deliver that to an audience.
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I believe that the core purpose of a physical book
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is to record our existence
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and to leave it behind on a shelf, in a library, in a home,
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for generations down the road to understand where they came from,
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that people went through some of the same things
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that they're going through,
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and it's like a dialogue that you have with the author.
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I think you have a much more human relationship to a printed book
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than you do to one that's on a screen.
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People want the experience of holding it,
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of turning the page, of marking their progress in a story.
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And then you have, of all things, the smell of a book.
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Fresh ink on paper or the aging paper smell.
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You don't really get that from anything else.
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The book itself, you know, can't be turned off with a switch.
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It's a story that you can hold in your hand
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and carry around with you
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and that's part of what makes them so valuable,
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and I think will make them valuable for the duration.
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A shelf of books, frankly,
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is made to outlast you, (Laughs)
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no matter who you are.