The physical book, hoarded without undue sentiment

Alan Jacobs links a piece in the NYT by James Gleick arguing that books have been made into fetish objects by people who continue to bestow special value on them apart from digital representations that do the job of presenting texts to us just fine.  Jacobs agrees with Gleick against the Folger's Michael Witmore, who tries to argue that physical books are necessary for physical aspects of the interpretive task.

Like Jacobs and Gleick, I agree that this sort of defense of the book really boils down to sentimentality.  To say that a physical book opens up a new world of interpretation is only slightly more palatable (at least it has the veneer of avoiding pointlessness) than the overly aesthetic appeal to books as precious items in themselves.  While I happen to agree about the appeal of books and value them highly myself merely for their physicality, I don't pretend that this attraction is overly important.  In the end, beyond my subjective attachments, Jacobs and Gleick are of course right.  Books are functional, and they aren't special simply because they come in a particular form that strikes me as special.

That said, physical books should be protected tooth and nail, and do not become obsolete simply because there is a high quality digital representation available.  Why?  Not because you can get anything more out of a physical book than a digitized version, but because it is the basic bibliographic artifact, and so long as it remains useful as a text (rather than simply deteriorated paper that hangs around as a relic), it should be kept and curated as one of the original versions. I am in full support of antiquarians who take inordinate amounts of time tending to their collections, or research libraries that devote miles of stacks to fragile volumes, each of which might only be pulled out for examination once every few decades.

But why?  Not because these books are special, but because they're the books.  A digitization of a microfilm of a book isn't going to be as helpful as a digitization of the book.  Likewise future digitizations with more sophisticated resolutions will refer to the book.  A digital repository can say: the text is here, but a librarian can say: Here is the book.  Consider it a sort of insurance for future copying.  Or maybe a claim to the priority version.  Or maybe just the book itself.  For those concerned with texts, isn't that reason enough to keep physical books?  To hoard them, even?

Sometimes I think the irrational excitation of hoarding naturally leads "book lovers" to post hoc aesthetic analyses of why books are important.  While understandable, this explanation of one's devotion to the physical book is somewhat wrongheaded.  Collecting physical books and keeping them safe for use even amidst their digital representations warrants an irrational sort of devotional hoarding because the enemy is, in fact, at the gates.  We lose texts every day because we lose the physical books in which they find print.  So we circle around the books and declare our undying devotion to them, even though the reasons we give for maintaining such devotion are sometimes baseless and do unjustifiably make books into fetish objects.