The importance of books in a digital world

While on my morning walk today I listened to Jesse Thorn's interview on The Sound of Young America with the author of "The Invention of Air", Steven Johnson. I now have a new addition to my list of books to read. During my K-12 education I never liked history classes. They seemed to be just a jumble of dates and wars. If there were interdisciplinary connections made and history was told more like the story that it is rather than the dry (so-called) facts, I think I would have enjoyed history much more! With new media there are so many options for education. Teachers can gather information with ease and students can do research and find more interested things than before but as Steven Johnson and Bill Clinton state, books are still important. Social media is a tool. As I read recently in a marketing blog, social media enables us to have conversations - remember those? And what can you meaningfully converse about if you don't read books? Darnit, I guess my 10th grade Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Vircillo, was correct when she said that it was important to read the classic books (that I found so boring at the time and have since gone back to read) because otherwise you would feel left out in a conversation when someone refers to Romeo & Juliet or The Old Man and the Sea.