We’ve moaned about the loss of the sight, the touch, and the smell of the paper book. Now comes the less tangible practicalities. How do you inscribe or annotate one of those electronic fuckers? Notes to self, author signatures, good wishes from aunties and uncles—all lost to the tyranny of e-ink. I’m not worried. I’m pretty sure that somewhere, in some deep, buried laboratory bunker under the Canadian Shield, Margaret Atwood and her team of wacky scientists are hard at work on the issue.

Before I worked in publishing, and learned about things like first editions and galleys, I treated books like they were notepads, scribbling lists and phone numbers into them, stuffing articles between pages to read later. It’s these lists I flip back to now to remind me of who I was years before—a journal of sorts. For example, on an impulsive train ride taken one March, when my roommate Emily and I were living in Paris many years ago, we used my copy of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Stories to write down the list of ten people—living or dead—we’d invite to a dinner party. I chose Camille Paglia in my number one spot (Paglia, whom I had not even read at the time!); Emily chose Jack the Ripper.

What will eventually become of these books with their treasure trove of notes and inscriptions? Electronic books are just pixels on a screen. These personal connections to the past make physical books so much more than that.