Yesterday’s New York Times contained an Op-Ed piece by James Gleick which for the most part had little new to say, merely recycling platitudes we’ve all already read elsewhere.

But the piece, titled “How to Publish Without Perishing,” did contain one passage which, while it may also be obvious to you, seemed new to me:

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

I’d never thought of it in quite that way, though I’ve often thought something similar—that is, we love the wine, and not the bottle.

And so the text is more important than the clay tablet upon which it is baked, the sheepskin scroll on which it it inked, the book in which it is printed, or the pixels of which it is made.

If nothing else, at least that one concept of Gleick’s stood out.