Ebooks have been popular for decades and audiobooks are increasingly so. But physical books are still the decided favourite: a survey of Australian publishers after last Christmas reported print books made up a comfortable majority of sales (ebooks were 4–18% and audiobooks 5–15%). This is despite regular warnings about the death of the book.

Some critics of print books have even changed their tune. “We need to get over books,” wrote journalist Jeff Jarvis in a 2009 book calling for them to be digitised. “I recant,” he wrote in the Atlantic nearly 15 years later, in 2023.

Some readers like a print book’s sensory qualities: its feel and smell. For others, there is satisfaction in assembling a book collection. Like vinyl records, sales of which are also healthy, print books can be collected as valued objects to be cherished. Collections, and individual special books, can be admired, shared and displayed, in homes and on social media.

Books are used to communicate taste and class, from celebrity book clubs to a current trend for sharing lovingly annotated books on social media. Books signify reverence for culture – and bring it into domestic, accessible spaces. Earlier this year, Books and Publishing reported on a rise in “luxury” special editions of already published books. Romance author and academic Jodi McAlister calls them “a romanticisation of the physical object of the book”.

Print books in particular are carriers of history, knowledge and shared stories – as I’m learning through an ongoing joint research project into community publishing in regional Australia. And widespread horror at the destruction of books and libraries in Ukraine and Gaza reflects our collective knowledge that they represent culture itself.

Preserving community stories

With Alexandra Dane, Sandra Phillips and Kim Wilkins, I interviewed 27 self-published authors. Most of them wanted to create a physical book, rather than an ebook. For these authors, publishing a print book was important because it created a tangible record.

Our research showed people instinctively turned to the print format as the best way to preserve their memories and histories, and share these with other people in their communities.

For example, we interviewed Sonya Bradley-Shoyer from Burdekin, north Queensland, who self-published her poetry collection Come … Walk With Me in 2024 as a print book with multiple photographs and illustrations. Bradley-Shoyer writes her poetry on a tablet, but was drawn to publishing in print format to ensure her poems had a secure home.

“People would say, Sonya, you really need to put them in a book so you have them there for future,” she reflected, “I used to give them a thumbs up, yep, yep, because I knew it was much harder.” It took her “a number of years” to produce her book.

Print allows books to circulate visibly in a community. Another author we interviewed, Christine Adams, has written a number of books relating to the history of Broken Hill, and her books have been sold at local venues including the Broken Hill fire station and the tourist information centre. Adams sees her books as preserving cultural heritage and local stories, telling us what she does is “all for a love of the city”.

Several of the self-published authors quoted in our project’s DIY Publishing Toolkit also make this point. George Venables, a Burdekin-based author, spoke to us about publishing an anthology with his local writers’ group. He told us, “People can have it on their coffee table and say, oh I’ve got it, he’s autographed it for me.”

Making a print book is meaningful for young writers. Jane Vaughan is a bookseller at Big Sky Stories in Broken Hill, where she ran a series of workshops for young people culminating in the publication of an anthology of stories. Jane spoke to us about how meaningful the book launch was: “when they had that book, and they were walking around going, This is mine, this is mine. Mine’s on this page.”

That value, of a book being shared in a community, also came through in our conversation with Olivia Nigro from Running Water Community Press, an author-run publisher in Alice Springs focusing on First Nations storytelling and copyright justice. Olivia told us about the Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women’s Talk poetry collection, which they published in 2020 (under their former name Ptilotus Press, and reprinted in 2021).

“Having it as a tangible paperback format, for people to hold and read and carry with them where they go is really important.”

Destruction of books

The physical objects of books are meaningful; so, too, is their loss. Last year, I found myself standing next to The Empty Library. This monument in the Bebelplatz square in Berlin is simple, but powerful.

It’s a square of glass set into the ground. Below is a white void filled with empty bookshelves. The monument commemorates the Nazi book burnings, in which crowds of people watched the destruction of 20,000 blacklisted books.

Memorial to the Nazi-era book burnings at the Bebelplatz in Berlin, Germany. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Because books hold culture, history, language, knowledge and stories, their deliberate destruction has a deep impact. In an opinion piece for the LA Times, cultural heritage researcher Laila Hussein Moustafa writes that “the destruction of libraries in times of war and violent conflict is tragically common”. She noted the attack by Bosnian Serb forces on the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, and the looting of the Baghdad National Library in 2003.

What is at stake in such destruction, Moustafa writes, is libraries as “cultural repositories. They hold collective memory, preserve cultural heritage, showcase societal development and afford individuals the opportunity for learning and growth.”

This year, reporting on the destruction of Gaza’s libraries by the Israeli Defence Force, journalist Shahd Alnaami wrote that seeing images of books burning “felt like fire burning my own heart.” She continued:

The attacks on Gaza’s libraries are targeting not just the buildings themselves, but the very essence of what Gaza represents. They are part of the effort to erase our history and prevent future generations from becoming educated and aware of their own identity.

Part of the “heartbreaking reality” of the scale of the attacks on Gaza, Alnaami wrote, is that some of the surviving books have had to be burned by Palestinians for fuel. Novelist and academic Yousri al-Ghoul writes that on a day-to-day level, the tragic loss of culture is subsumed because “survival itself hangs in the balance”.

In May 2024, a Russian missile hit Ukraine’s largest printing house, killing seven people and injuring 21. The strike also destroyed 50,000 newly published books. It took place just a week before the Arsenal book festival, a popular event in Kyiv where many of the destroyed books were due to be sold. Burnt copies of the books were displayed among the new releases on show.

Print books can communicate something about who we are.

Print books may be burnt or absent. They may be shared in a community, held in a library, cherished in a home or shared online. In all these contexts, print books are vivid objects, reminders of culture’s precarity and its endurance.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Beth Driscoll, The University of Melbourne

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Beth Driscoll receives funding from Australian Research Council Linkage Project grant LP210300666