On Tuesday 11 August 2026, ACU’s Raheen Library hosted a conversation between Dr Alex Little, Dr Killian Quigley, and Library Coordinator Fiona Gibson entitled Real Books vs E-Books: Made for Knowledge, Beauty, or Convenience?
The following is an edited transcript of the discussion.
Fiona Gibson: First, we should acknowledge that there’s no disputing the benefits and values of e-books in terms of accessibility, searchability, and portability. For students at university, digital content can be a lifeline. But digitalisation also raises a variety of pressing questions, not least for libraries. As institutions begin ‘weeding projects’ to remove little-used physical books, we need to work together to decide which older books are worth preserving, and why.
Let’s begin, therefore, with a fundamental question: what has made books so important, to so many cultures, through the centuries?
Killian Quigley: This is one of those questions that feels as though it should have an obvious answer—but what is it exactly? Perhaps it’s something like: books are technological artefacts, and as artefacts, they have proven incredibly effective at doing the things we ask of them. I believe we should think of printed and digital texts as artefacts. One question we’re grappling with today is what happens to the affordances of a printed book when it is re-mediated as a digital ‘text’.
Alex Little: I agree. And I’d make the case that a book means more than strictly text on a page. Books have social and cultural functions, and we know this by the ways they’re shared, passed down, and so on. A physical text takes on a life of its own as it’s read, given, and received—and as it preserves the traces of its readers. Books have social lives that extend far beyond their dates of publication, and this helps explain why they’ve remained so important to us.
KQ: This is such an important point, and it makes me think about how books mediate relationships. Since 2012, my mother and I have read books together; here’s the 116th! [Holds up a paperback copy of Paul Lynch’s Grace (2017).] I think our relationships often depend on mediation of one kind or another—and for many of us, books are incredible enablers of mutual sociability, care, and love.
FG: Is there something inherently more enduring about print books in comparison to e-books?
KQ: I think the short answer is, definitely! But I don’t want to get into zero-sum thinking here. I’m also open to the idea that, as a 42-year-old who grew up building an archive of physical media—books, CDs and so on, my relationship with media is shaped by my generation and may differ from others. Still, yes: I believe that for many of us, there is something more substantial, more powerfully mediating, more sociable about printed texts.
AL: Consider personal libraries. When you visit a friend’s house, you’re drawn to their bookshelf not just because it holds a collection of books, but because it expresses their personality. Or imagine there’s a chair in your house, and you place a book next to it. You have created a dedicated space for reading, and there is something distinctive about this that cannot be replicated with an iPad or Kindle. As for physical media in general, I see such a resurgence in their popularity, especially among young people. Think of record shops, including all the ones just down the road from where we sit [in Fitzroy]. Think of book clubs.
FG: Killian, the library has purchased some amazing print books and sourced some wonderful interlibrary loans, for your research. What do these resources provide your work that digital materials might not?
KQ: Great question. I’ll start with a slightly grumpy answer. It is just a fact that texts tend to be designed for physical formats, and that processes of digitising those texts often create problems. These problems include formatting, pagination and referencing, and they affect both teaching and research. My less grumpy answer is that we could be thinking harder, and more creatively, about what are the particular affordances of a physical artefact, and what are the particular affordances of a digital artefact—and how could we think of an ecosystem in which all these different artefacts exist, differently?
FG: Alex, in your research as an historian, primary sources are extremely important. Could you describe the roles of print and digital resources in your work?
AL: I began my PhD in 2019, and just as I completed the first major degree milestone, Covid hit. This transformed my approach to research. Fortunately, a great deal of digitization had been happening, such as the Australian Joint Copying Project, the parliamentary Hansard, and Trove. Those resources proved crucial for my PhD, and so did the archival visits, including to the Australian War Memorial, that I was able to undertake when things opened up a bit. There is something thrilling about archival work: holding historical materials in your hands makes you feel connected to objects that have endured and changed over time. I think the importance of archival work remains really important, and at the same time, it’s fantastic that digital resources render materials accessible to researchers who are unable to visit archives in person. This gives us a greater variety of voices engaging with historical materials.
FG: We’re busy digitizing here, too. What feels different about reading a physical book compared with accessing a digital text?
KQ: Our embodied relationships with print books are of course different. When Alex was talking about the reading chair, it occurred to me that we not only put books in space—books configure spaces for us. They do things to spaces.
FG: I’m reminded that, many years ago, I was backpacking around Scotland, and I was carrying a book about Mary, Queen of Scots. I was in Edinburgh when I finished it, and I left it on a bus, feeling that it was the right place and time for someone else to take it up. I wonder where that book is now.
AL: It took on its next life.