William Gass response

Paria Saeedi

Social Media

1/15/14

According to William Gass’s essay there are specific things about books that we can never achieve on screens.  He describes book as something that he has a strong relation with and never let it go.

A book is something we can carry everywhere it is attached to us as part of our life for example, Gass says that books are like fish and chips wrapped around together can’t be separated from each other.  In addition, books on screens are not something we can keep them for long time, because we can’t own them so long. For instance, having books on kindle are a way to read to read books but the problem is they are not our books amazon rent it to us. We can also buy them but still Gass thinks we don’t own them like a hard copy book.

A book has its own goods that also can’t be reproduce the function that we can turn the pages over and over again easily, is hard to do on screen because the turning function on screen happens so fast that most of the time it misplaces the page we actually wanted to read. In hard copy books we can turn the page by hand and never have problem missing any page.

Overall William Gass think of a book as a life time friend that we can hold on to it for long time, use it easily, have it everywhere with us and even have nostalgic moments with it, for instance some annotate on the margins from college or high school. Therefore we love books we live with them and have possibilities that make them takeover screens.

The book that I own that actually became part of my life is a book called one thousand one year written by a Persian author. I got this book from the author when I was in middle school at his home that my friends and me where invited. The fact that I found this book interesting was that the simple story the book had to explain a unreal story about life of a person who becomes friend with stars however it is like a fiction but it actually teaches so many lessons about life and people.