The other morning, our daughters woke up clamoring to hear Pinocchio before breakfast. I’m not one of those who vows to always cling to the printed page. Before we left for California, I topped off my iPad with a dozen new titles. I accost strangers on airplanes to show them how dandy it is to load thousands of pages (including this newspaper) onto something the size of a shirt cardboard.

But part of the connection our daughters make with Pinocchio seems to be that he’s a little puppet-boy in a book they hold, hide and run to find in the morning, not digits in a download.

My wife says that she can sense a buzz of conversation whenever she enters a room with books, with books of different colors and sizes seeming to speak to and recommend each other.

Online sites recommend a lot, too. If you buy Philip Levine’s haunting 1992 collection of poems, “What Work Is” (timely not just because the author is now poet laureate of the U.S. but because of lines like, “somewhere ahead / a man is waiting who will say / “No, we’re not hiring today”) you’ll see buy buttons for Mr. Levine’s other books and those of other poets and writers whose themes or mere titles some software judges to be similar.

But part of the beauty of books on shelves is that they seem to talk across the aisles: Histories talk to poetry, which call to thrillers, which shout over to sports, which roar at the dramas.

One of the books on a stack that called to me in that store was a collection by John Updike, “Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism,” which features a 2000 essay in which Updike, who died of cancer in 2009, presciently accepts the imminence of hand-held reading devices but laments the loss of books as physical things:

“Books waiting to be read, as tempting as grapes unharvested and musky, years to be blown off in a second of sudden plucking. . . . One’s collection comes to symbolize the contents of one’s mind, reminders of moments, of stages in a pilgrimage. . . . Books preserve, daintily, the redolence of their first reading—the beach, that apartment, that attack of croup, that flight to Indonesia.”

I am sure that soon there will be nifty new animated e-Pinocchios who can sing like Andrea Bocelli and move like Mikhail Baryshnikov. I’m sure I’ll get those for my daughters, too.

But I’m glad to have this summer memory of exploring a mound of old books, finding Pinocchio, and bringing him home. Among all the bosh and piffle I have gotten our daughters this summer—twinkling plastic princess crowns, fade-away flower tattoos, and purple bathtub fizzies—the old books we have bought seem to touch them with the idea that other children have held and loved those stories, too.

We read Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” next.

Mr. Simon, host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, is the author of “Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other” (Random House, 2010).