Reading Past the Cover

The following is a MediaNote Classic. It was originally presented to MC101 students in January 2019.

Your Humble Blogger has observed that there are people who develop a strong attachment to newspapers or radio shows, but there are people who truly love books. The proudly display them in their homes and keep some of them until the day they die. So what is it about books? Our conversation will start with this NPR story.

Questions...

•Why do some people develop an emotional attachment to books?

•Why does this old, low-tech medium endure in this era of digital, visual, audio media?

•Is there anything that books do better than other mass media?

•Does a book lose anything when it moves to a digital format?