E-readers, such as Kindle and Nook, are great tools. In them, you can carry hundreds of books without hurting your back or your wallet. You can even read several books at once without the danger of paper cuts or of losing your bookmark.

Unfortunately, e-readers have a dark side. In this age, we seem to rely on technology for everything. Communication, entertainment, information, and now…to read books? While it is wonderful that technology allows more people to expand their bookish horizons, I have trepidation at the thought of e-readers coming to replace books entirely.

I have been a reader for almost my entire life. I have hundreds of books stacked all over my house. When I go to a bookstore, I have to physically restrain myself from buying everything in sight. Few things give me greater joy than piles and piles of books.

That said, my issue with e-readers is not only that they may cause bookstores to eventually disappear—which, by the way, would be a tragedy—but also that they seem to be ushering in an age in which we no longer print paper books.

This is a problem.

As Atwood, Orwell, Bradbury, and many other brilliant writers have told us, it is always dangerous to allow the information we receive to be filtered. With paper books, once they are distributed, a copy of them will likely always exist, no matter how hard you try to burn them all. With e-readers, however, ideas can be tampered with. Slowly, messages and plot lines can be changed until they barely resemble the originals at all.

Granted, this will probably not happen for generations. However, our children may already inherit a low economy and a culture of beauty over substance and of entertainment over value. Do we also want to bequeath them a world in which books, food for the brain, are twisted into something else, or worse, largely vacuous?

To write a book is to shape ideas from air. Good books impact the world every time someone reads them. They spark argument about important things, such as domestic violence laws, the status of the government, masculine and feminine roles, economic inequality, and so on. They help teach you how to think and discern. A good book makes you a better version of yourself for having read it.

If the majority of our books are nothing more than code projected on to a screen, at the mercy of any person with the hack knowledge or the clearance to tamper with them, our ideas are not safe. As the media will show you, if humans are not taught to think for themselves (and don’t figure it out on their own) then popularity dictates what the majority believes. If the popular books (which usually become popular movies) say that something is true, then the majority will, by degrees, come to believe it. This is extremely dangerous.

If we do not think for ourselves as a society then we are setting ourselves up for misery. It is only through free thinking, after all, that we can have progression. Because of the edicts of the Vatican, for example, it was a fight to make people listen to the idea of a heliocentric solar system. Do we really want to have to wait for the intelligentsia to rise again? That could take ages and would, by necessity, be bloody.

I suggest that books and e-readers continue to exist in tandem. Print the books, have them available for e-reader purchase, and continue to please both sides of the spectrum. Because while e-readers are great tools, print books are necessary for free thinking and intelligence to continue to rise.