E-BOOKS OR PAPER BOOKS?

BY C. FRANCIS O'LEARY AND IAN PROCTOR

As society continues to modernize and work toward achieving a sustainable environment, the question of whether or not to abandon paper books is a relevant one. This has led to conversations about what value paper books offer. One camp argues paper books are necessary to preserve history given digital media’s impermanence. Others say a balance of e-books and paper books can be optimized to suit our needs.

Proctor: Keep paper books around, please. O’Leary: Paper books and e-books can coexist

Schools, including colleges like UO, should keep paper books around for archival and study reasons. Something about reading words on a screen makes it harder for them to stick, probably because there’s no muscle memory or touch involved.

For millennia, man has decided to put words on pieces of paper, which is basically reeds and wood smushed together and dyed white. For a while they did it on clay tablets, which may have looked cool but could break. So, we’ve put the words on pieces of paper. And little fragments of these pieces of paper have survived to the present day — take, for instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which allow us to see the early influences behind the Bible.

The biggest reason why society as a whole should keep paper books around is because of the fact that digital information doesn’t last forever. What happens when civilization collapses, and the internet and cellular networks shut down? When the e-book hosting websites no longer function? Future archeologists looking back would be unable to see the remnants and information left by our culture during the time we used the internet as our primary source of communication. There wouldn’t be any paper fragments left to find, aside from the occasional scraps of a Michelle Obama book. Hence, we should keep paper books around as a way to preserve records, data and history for future generations.

I love books. I love the tactile experience, reading marginalia and loaning my favorite copies to friends. But what I really love about books are the stories they hold. I’ll read anything: Sci-fi, horror, history, philosophy, you name it. That love of stories leads me not to cut off e-books just because I’m not used to their format.

I learned to appreciate e-books last summer when I didn’t have one. My job entailed going for weeks at a time without access to bookstores or the internet. I simply couldn’t pack as many books as I could read. I flew through the few books I had brought and then had to resort to borrowing from colleagues. Some of the books they loaned me were great. Some weren’t. Overall, I would have been happier with my own curated collection.

The greatest advantage of e-books, like all electronics, is convenience. Being able to carry hundreds of books in a package the size of a Junie B. Jones paperback is hard to beat. There are also environmental advantages to not printing on trees and transporting them cross country. Further, e-books have user-friendly features like being able to search an entire text at the press of a button rather than trying to remember the page where that particularly impactful passage was.

I don’t think e-books can or should ever replace paper books. I just think they both have advantages, and any lover of stories should take advantage of both.

Ian Proctor is an editorial cartoonist for the Daily Emerald. He is a freshman with interests in journalism, political science and animation, as well as paleontology and biology. Ian’s comics may appear bizarre, but this is just the way he tends to draw things.

C. Francis O’Leary

is the editor for the Emerald’s opinion desk. They are interested in democracy, the preservation of the natural world and having a good time.

(Summer Surgent-Gough/Emerald)

UNLAWFUL CENSORSHIP IN THE AGE OF INFORMATION

Book banning movements across the country only serve to remove underrepresented and marginalized voices from libraries. This then traps citizens in echo chambers with no alternate perspectives.

BY CAITLIN TAPIA • TWITTER @CAITLINTAPIA21

In Utah, parents campaigned to ban “The Hate U Give,” “This One Summer” and several other books for their content addressing race, gender and sexuality. In Kansas, parents successfully appealed to the school board to remove over two dozen books for content deemed “inappropriate” and “offensive.” Even worse, in Virgina, two school board members wanted not only to remove the books from libraries, but to burn them.

This isn’t the first time books have been challenged for their content. “To Kill A Mockingbird,” for example, is regularly one of the top 10 most challenged books because of its offensive language and depictions of race. However, while the Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that books cannot be banned simply because of their content, the American Library Association reported in September 2021 a 60% increase in book challenges than that of the year previously.

In response to these movements, the ALA published a statement on Nov. 30 addressing the value of intellectual freedom and the First Amendment's importance regarding the publication of all works of literature.

“Falsely claiming that these works are subversive, immoral, or worse, these groups induce elected and non-elected officials to abandon constitutional principles, ignore the rule of law, and disregard individual rights to promote government censorship of library collections,” the ALA stated.

Similarly, in December, the National Coalition Against Censorship released a joint statement with organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, GLAAD, the National Black Justice Coalition and over 600 additional groups. “These ongoing attempts to purge schools of books represent a partisan political battle fought in school board meetings and state legislatures,” the statement read. “The undersigned organizations and individuals are deeply concerned about this sudden rise in censorship and its impact on education, the rights of students, and freedom of expression.”

This certainly isn’t the first time librarians and organizations have had to fight against censorship movements across the country. But these defenders of knowledge persist because they understand the fundamental dangers of echo chambers.

In the age of ever-changing and developing technology, it would be assumed that there would be no room for echo chambers to exist. That the internet and the vast amount of readily available information would serve to eliminate these chambers. However, quite the opposite has proven to be true.

“Individuals empowered to screen out material that does not conform to their existing preferences may form virtual cliques, insulate themselves from opposing points of view, and reinforce their biases. Internet users can seek out interactions with likeminded individuals who have similar values, and thus become less likely to trust important decisions to people whose values differ from their own,” MIT researchers Marshall Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson wrote.

Echo chambers are fundamentally dangerous because they remove original thoughts and the challenging of ideas. This then limits debates, which are necessary in a society. When these debates do not occur, we do not solve the problems and issues surrounding division and polarization.

Conservatives have historically used book banning as a way to voice their opinions around what should and should not be taught to their children. Often these are beliefs which silence the voices of the underrepresented and marginalized. For children growing up in these conservative areas, if there are no pieces of work which represent the struggles of race or gender and sexuality, then these children are trapped in the echo chambers their parents construct for them, which deprives them of the stimulation of unfamiliar and uncomfortable ideas.

“We should have a complete collection, something that challenges all of our viewpoints, presents lots of different ideas from different people, perspectives and allows us to consider the great body of human knowledge that’s out there,” Will O’Hearn, library services director for the Eugene Public Library, said.

O’Hearn said the library has not received any formal reconsideration requests recently. This is a sign Eugene may be free from the raging book banning movement.

“I think sometimes people forget that literature is art. And art makes people feel things. Sometimes it’s happiness, wonderment, sadness, humor and then also frustration and anger,” O’Hearn said. “They’re meant to evoke emotion.”

Caitlin Tapia is an opinion columnist for the Daily Emerald. She is a second-year student from Colorado majoring in journalism and political science. She is most passionate about social justice and politics but loves to debate about anything.

Avery Haines poses and plays his guitar in the Eugene Masonic Cemetery. (Malena Saadeh/Emerald) Avery Haines uses the alias Amos Heart on his debut album “The House on the Hill.” (Malena Saadeh/Emerald)

WALKING INSIDE “THE HOUSE ON THE HILL”

Eugene singer/songwriter Amos Heart gives the Emerald an inside look at his debut album and upcoming tour.

BY MALENA SAADEH

Feel free to search far and wide for the latest version of something that hurts as good as “Songs of Leonard Cohen” and feels as chilly as Bon Iver’s “Blood Bank.” But what if I told you that you didn’t need to look further than Alder Street? Eugene based singer/ songwriter Avery Haines, who goes by the alias of Amos Heart, released his first album with collaboration from Portland’s Ann Annie titled “The House on the Hill” this past December. If you haven’t heard it yet, I’m sorry my friend, but you’re late to the party.

With the debut, Heart takes a nostalgic peek into his past with a heavy dose of reflection onto the listener's own past. Whispers of wintertime love and warm reminders of a life left behind make the new LP refreshingly personal. All tied up in the romantic gloom of the Siberian raw of a Northwest winter, I’d call this indie-folk album the ideal backdrop for the rain that covers Eugene as your cold fingers grip this flimsy newspaper. While you could catch Heart and Ann Annie’s drift from an at-home listen, you’re bound to see a new side of the album when you hear the guys on their upcoming PNW tour. Joined by Portland singer/songwriter Searows, the crew will be playing shows from Eugene to Bellingham, Washington, Jan. 6 through 16 with their final show of the tour in Eugene on the 16th.

“We're kind of creating a new sound with how we have to adapt to the live format to hit the road,” Heart said. “The sets are going to be more stripped than the album, but not as stripped as when I wrote them.” On record, “The House on the Hill” carries capacity in the jelly-thick layers of sound behind guitar and vocals. On tour, however, the band is presenting the album in its most raw form.

“We're going back to the roots of a lot of these songs on the road and playing them as they were

originally written,'' Heart said.

The album’s cover hints at the nostalgia inside with a picture drawn by Heart’s father about 30 years ago. The first track then funnels you out of your own place and back to Heart’s childhood home in Portland. He takes on the role of a narrator and invites you inside. By walking you through Ann Annie’s atmosphere of ambient noise and stopping to show you old pictures on the walls, he puts you at ease and introduces you to the place you’ll sit for the rest of the songs.

From the first taste, “The House on the Hill” feels familiar. Song one moves seamlessly into the second with upbeat chatter behind warm chords. This is where it all starts to feel like an “A Christmas Carol” type dreamscape. The listener becomes an uninterrupting observer to the memories being shared.

“It's a reflective time when I listen to these songs, and I really enjoy reflecting on the past,” Heart said as we move through the album.

While the album overall juxtaposes hopeful lyrics and melancholic look back, there are definitely moments on “The House on the Hill'' that explode. Take the fifth track, “11 Janvier 80” — it goes from sitting in a whirly John Cale-esque pocket into a blow of drums and atmosphere in what seems like a second. This side of Heart’s sound floored me on my first listen — I’d never heard him do something like this before.

The only time I’ve seen Heart play, I was half a bottle of Mango-scato deep listening to gentle covers of “Chelsea Hotel.” The way Ann Annie toyed with some of these songs, adding modular synth and layers of sound, brought out Heart’s trackless side, breeding a balanced mix of letting loose and dialing back.

The whole thing was recorded at Echo Hill Studios up in Portland by Edwin Paroissien, who was the brain behind the latest from Laundry and the new stuff from Novacane, both local Eugene bands. It's no surprise we were hearing so much space and life around the tracks on the production side of things as well.

“I wrote all of these songs over the years on my guitar and nothing else,” Heart said. “But when we got into the studio, a lot of them exploded into more vast sonic experiences. How I wrote 'em, and what they became by the end was a pretty big jump.”

Even so, that initial acoustic integrity isn’t lost with what the tracks picked up along the way. The lyrics capture the essence of homecoming, and the songs they sit inside are cozy all around. There's a swirling sort of cold around the album that feels Northwestmade, but the tracks stay bright and full. If you told me this whole thing was thought up in a little log cabin with rain on the roof and gray in the sky, I’d be quick to buy it. Especially in tracks like “Maxwell” and “Troubadour,” the old cliché of “cold hands warm heart” comes to life.

There are little nuggets that I look for every time I go back to “The House on the Hill,” like the opening riff in “Case of Belonging” that feels as hazy as “Stranger Song” — but the place this album really peaks is the closing track, “I’m the Son of the Fall and the Rain.” It feels like what plays during the credits in one of those movies where everything turns out alright for everyone in the end. You can almost feel Heart cracking a smile as he sings it, and when the long fade out comes in, you find yourself sitting in its tenor.

I’d call “The House on the Hill” one hell of an album to get you through the season and to the spring.

“I WROTE ALL OF THESE SONGS OVER THE YEARS ON MY GUITAR AND NOTHING ELSE.”

- AVERY HAINES