A perennial topic of conversation among people who debate literature on the Internet is the relative importance of books as physical objects. Foremost among defenders of the printed book are those who extol the sensual pleasures of reading—the feel of the pages, the heft of the object, the smell of the paper—and maintain that it is impossible to experience those pleasures digitally. 

In a related, but separate, camp are those attracted not to the tactile pleasures of books but to their beauty as objects.

via Internet Book Fetishists Versus Anti-Fetishists | The New Yorker.