Thomas Jefferson once said, “I cannot live without books.” If his idea is to be followed, there will be lots of dead people in the next couple years as a result of e-readers.

E-readers are the newest addition to the digital age, but while iPods effectively replaced walkmans and tape players, e-readers are not replacement for actual books and should not be used as such. A book is more than the words on the page, and an e-reader eliminates all the aesthetic and sentimental value of an actual book.

Selecting a book to read begins with the physical book itself and the front cover. Potential readers glance at the front, examine the cover art, turn through the pages, and decide whether or not to move on to a different choice. An e-reader eliminates the ability to do such things.

“I like turning pages, and seeing what’s on the cover, and being able to dog-ear the pages, all those little things,” Hayley Hinsberger, junior, said.

Hinsberger reads two to three books per week, and said she would miss the visual and physical value of books, what with all their pages bound together under a bright cover. An e-reader is merely a computer screen. E-readers also eliminate certain nuances of reading a book.

“With a real book, if you think something’s interesting, you fold the page with your finger and then flip back to it…[If] you know a certain character said something on one page, you can flip straight back to that page. You don’t have to do a ‘search term’ or something to find that spot,” Hinsberger said.

E-readers also make sharing books with a friend or family member much more difficult. Because the book is a file, there is no way to simply hand it off to a friend for a week, then take it back once that friend has finished reading. The other person has to have an e-reader as well.

“Say you want to share your book with a friend, you finish it, you’re like ‘Oh wow, this is a great book, I’ll just lend it to my friend.’ But with an E-reader, that’s kind of difficult because it’s a digital copy of a book, and it’s like with music where you can’t just give them a copy. You have to copy it, probably illegally, and try and give it to them,” Hinsberger said.

Beyond even the aesthetic value of books and the impracticality of sharing digital copies, books also contain pure sentimental value. Every book at a library has a history, someone who picked it up and read it somewhere and at some point in time. They may have liked it or hated it, but by checking it out, they added a piece of that book’s history for every future reader to be a part of.

E-readers use digital copies of books; there is no shared history with past readers, no sentimental value attached. The book is a digital file floating around in cyberspace with no meaning attached beyond the words on the screen.

Picking up a book promises new adventures, excitement, and stories to savor and tell friends about. E-readers and their digital copies are no replacement for the feeling of opening a book and feeling the pages full of words begging to tell a story. While iPods and new computers have been a great success at replacing their counterparts, the digital age has found a technology in e-readers that should never replace its counterpart: books.