The Dog-Eared Paperback, Newly Endangered in an E Book Age. That what I saw on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times. It got me thinking about a presentation we’d heard at school the day before about the inevitable obsolescence of the conventional library. “There simply isn’t the need to use all this space to store physical books,” the speaker said. “It makes economic, practical, and environmental sense to digitalize libraries.”

One of my colleagues had a question. With the recent hurricane, many of us were living without power. This served as a reminder of how dependent we’ve gotten on technology. What happens when the system crashes? The speaker told us about The Internet Archive, where physical versions of digitalized books are being preserved in a vast underground vault. It was good to know, but I still felt a certain wistfulness. When I saw the Times headline, I understood why.

I know that what matters about books is their content, whether it’s relayed electronically or on paper. But my deepest connection to books isn’t theoretical or philosophical, but personal and sensory. It’s that comforting heft, the smell, the firm edge of the page turned by my fingers. I can see books I loved growing up as clearly as the faces of beloved family members-The Secret Garden, Jane Eyre, Gone With the Wind. I remember finding the stash of books in my mother’s dresser drawer- Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Godfather, Lolita. (Sorry, Mom; I read them and tucked them back carefully underneath your blue silk nightgown so you’d never know). I had my own stack of dog-eared paperbacks- To Kill a Mockingbird, A Member of the Wedding, To the Lighthouse. The person I grew up to be was hatched in the books I read, loved, re-read.

For me, the essence of a book isn’t in medium, but memory. It lives in the creases and folds of those dog-eared paperbacks, in a favorite passage, in deliciously lost afternoon with a story you just have to finish before dinner. Forget the vault; this is what I have been archiving all along.