The Transfiguration of an Unchanged Text

I wrote this on FacEBOOK today:
“I have been thinking more about whether reading a text in an ebook and the same text in a real book makes any difference. Time and time again I have found such a potential difference when real-time reviewing books since 2008, indeed many examples of this, the first I stumbled on today below being my review in 2011 of ‘The White Hands’ by Mark Samuels: http://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/60-2/“

And I then sought out some more of my own references on this subject (mainly real-time reviews). If you ‘find’ the word “ebook” in the texts indicated by the links shown below in this post’s first ‘comment’, you can also read all these references.

I am convinced that fiction real-book texts have a ‘spiritual hinterland’ or ‘shelf-life osmosis’ or ‘haunting Proustian memorability via stain or pencil mark or turned down corner etc’ which ebooks (bless their souls) can’t have. This hinterland stems from centuries of traditional books carrying a future-nostalgic ‘handleability’ of soul and adventure in fiction.

“Every book has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.” —from ‘The Shadow Of The Wind’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon