Quotes & Sayings About Books Versus Technology

Books are the best technology. — Self

In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it. — Sara Sheridan

Just as television didn't put an end to radio or the movies (to say nothing of books), I don't think e-books will put an end to hard copies, even for someone like me who loves technology and does not fetishize the physical medium of books. ~ Steven Pinker, author of The Lauguage Instinct, How the Mind Works The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. — Leah Price

In my books the technology that I choose to talk about has to serve the themes. What that means is that I end up having to cut out a lot of cool technology that would be really fun to describe and play with, but which would just confuse everybody. So in 'Amped,' I focus on neural implants. — Daniel H. Wilson

Smash market vs. mass market: Indie authors delve deep into expressive vertical genres. Book stores hold 90-day-credit-return literature. Why wait? In five years, Indie authors will be both. — Peter Prasad

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.
(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010) — Patti Smith

The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age and with rereading. — Michael Silverblatt

Books don't need batteries. — Nadine Gordimer

These kids all just want e-books." When she studied students in Canada and Israel, McNeish discovered something interesting that linked them all: students overwhelmingly prefer paper not out of any sense of nostalgia or a resistance to new technology, but because paper learning materials simply work better. "It's a lot of work to use these e-learning systems. And a lot easier to just learn from a textbook," McNeish said. "These kids are skilled with technology for entertainment, but they are not so skilled at technology for learning. — David Sax

The problem with being an author in this modern world is such: computers break often; books don't — Emma Iadanza

In the '50s, a lot of stories were built around radiation and the proliferation of new technology. In the '70s, there were a lot of stories that dealt with the Vietnam War. So comic books have always been a reflection of the times we live in. — Jim Lee

But it's also a human tendency - and a pronounced tendency in America - to become enamored of our tools and lose sight of their place. Think about a couple of the basic functions of any community: educating children and policing the streets. Today we spend huge effort and millions of dollars to bring more technology into the classroom, when the great majority of students in the great majority of circumstances can learn almost all of what they need to know with a supportive family, a pencil, some paper, good books, and a great teacher. The schools that produced Shakespeare and Jefferson and Darwin had some writing materials, some printed books - and that was it. — Eric Greitens

I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that's quickly giving way to modern technology. — Mary Kubica

What is childhood without stories? And how will children fall in love with stories without bookstores? You can't get that from a computer. — Sarah Jio

Using Facebook is like taking a Dyson to your spare time. — Gemini Adams

It isn't that information is exploding, but accessibility is. There's just about as much information this year as there was last year; it's been growing at a steady rate. It's just that now it's so much more accessible because of information technology. The consensus is that a Web crawler could get to a terabyte of publicly accesible HTML. A terabyte is about a million books. the UC Berkeley library has about 8 million books, and the Library of Congress has 20 million books. — Hal Varian

Most established novelists are writing books informed by experiences gained in their youth. Middle age is not the best time to be changing smartphones every six months or adopting new technology platforms - because we tend to get slower and less accommodating to change as we age. — Charles Stross

I might love my e-reader, but I'd never pass up the chance to browse real books. — Nichole Chase

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you'd be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today. — Dolly Parton

You can read books, blog posts, magazine articles (keep reading CODE Magazine, please), and watch training videos, and yet still not understand the impact of a technology in your development life. It's not until you build an application (large or small) using a particular tool, technique or technology that you will really get it. — Rod Paddock

It's a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field. — Stephen Covey

In popular books and articles, information technology writer Carr has worried over the ways that algorithms like those employed by Google are reshaping the ways we think. — Nicholas G. Carr

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them. — Neil Gaiman

A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. Often he had an idea in the middle of the night. He rose from his bed, took a shower, washed his hair, and shaved. He dressed completely, in a clean shirt, in polished shoes, a jacket and tie. Then he sat at his desk and wrote down his idea. A friend of mine asked him why he put himself through all that rigmarole. 'Why,' he said, surprised at the question, 'in honor of physics! — Annie Dillard

eBooks are just digital copies of analog books. Convenient, yes. But we have the technology now to rethink what a book is. — David Conger

Ooks look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. — Julian Barnes

We were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about information, books and books about books, data and metadata - I was, in other words, overstimulated yet gluttonous for more. — Marilyn Johnson

Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head. — Jasper Fforde

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
(Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, Harper's Magazine, February 2008) — Ursula K. Le Guin

Games are getting more interesting. I mean, when we talk about books, they can be anything from a summer blockbuster to 'War and Peace' - well, games are the same. I think the creative side is catching up with the technology. — Karen Traviss