Real books will survive as they are status symbols, Joan Brady has said Photo: ALAMY
E-books are “worthless” and have become the preserve of soap stars’ biographies and soft porn, while physical books will survive because people use them as status symbols, a Whitbread Prize-winning author has said.
By James Hall
Joan Brady, who won the literary prize in 1993 for Theory of War, a novel about a young boy sold into white slavery in post-Civil War America, said that paper books will never disappear because people use them to “confirm their social identity” and want to be seen carrying them.
Meanwhile lowbrow “pulp” such as “celebrity biographies, Mills & Boon and porn” will “disappear into e-books”, she said.
“Your Rolex watch? It’s a statement. A four-wheel drive? A statement. That’s what the books in your house are too,” Ms Brady told The Daily Telegraph.
She said that the millions of Britons who proudly display Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time on their bookshelves but have not actually read it are “proof” that physical books are used as status symbols.
“Hardly anybody read it; people bought it to put on their shelves so other people could see it,” she said.
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