Yes­ter­day, David Ehrlich wrote about the shared cul­ture, lan­guage, and fate of Israelis. He has been blog­ging here all week for Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and MyJew­ish­Learn­ing.

My third book was pub­lished this week. Need­less to say, I’m some­where between pan­ic and excite­ment. It’s the first one in Eng­lish after my two books in Hebrew. When I come up with a new book I’m pre­oc­cu­pied with all kinds of ques­tions, such as:

• Will peo­ple buy it?
• Will they like it?
• Will the review­ers like it?

With my new book pub­lished in the US, I also have wor­ries as an Israeli author, such as:

• Will my writ­ing be inter­est­ing to a for­eign reader?
• Will peo­ple who are not Jew­ish or those who know noth­ing about Israel want to read it?
• Will the book be received as uni­ver­sal, even though cer­tain sto­ries are clear­ly set in my own coun­try and culture?
• Will the Israeli ​“sit­u­a­tion,” as con­veyed in my book, seem bizarre or extreme from a distance?

But now I have a new set of ques­tions that have to do with tech­nol­o­gy. Take these, for example:

• Do peo­ple still read books?
• Is there life out­side of Facebook?
• Will there still be book­stores in 10 years?

So many times have I been advised to start a blog or pub­lish on the web. But there’s no way. I’m too attached to the print, the paper, the smell of the book. It’s a total­ly sen­su­al expe­ri­ence, isn’t it? How can I give up on my first and biggest love? Like every­body else, I live a con­sid­er­able part of my day on the com­put­er, but I resist giv­ing up on the rest of the world. Here’s a uni­ver­sal mes­sage that has noth­ing to do with being Jew­ish or Israeli: I’ll con­tin­ue read­ing and writ­ing books, real phys­i­cal books, even if I’m the last one to do so.