I still read old fashioned books, and it sometimes seems
that I’m one of the few people left on this planet who don’t own an eReader of
some kind. (It seems like Word doesn’t know what an eReader is yet. It wants me
to change it into ‘eraser’.) Until two years ago I said that I would never get
a smart phone because I didn’t want to check my email everywhere I went, but
since I then succumbed to my iPhone that has been attached to me from the day I
got it, I’m not going to say that I will never buy an eReader.
But I like regular books; because you can have the pages
flip through your hands, and see how far you are towards the end. I like how
people have thought about the cover, the font and what kind of paper it was
printed on. I like to look at my bookcase and see what books I have read. I
especially like my collection of Lonely Planets that show where I have been and
that sometimes even have beach sand or tickets and receipts falling out of them
when you open them. Along that line; I like to see what kinds of books people
have in their bookcases when I visit them. I think that when you only have
ebooks, you should at least get a projector and project a bookcase with all the
ebooks that you have on your eReader on the wall for people to see when they come
to your house. Also, I like browsing through second hand book stores (or I
should say Dr. BrownEyes loves browsing through second hand book stores and I’ve
come to like it over the years). How is that going to work when everyone only
reads ebooks on their eReader? And I like to see what people read on the train;
I like to know whether they read a book that I really like or if they read some
crappy news paper, and when they have an eReader I cannot see that (similar to
the book case-projector, people should announce what they are reading on the
back of their eReader I think).
But ask me again in two years and I’ll probably own an
eReader too…
I just like that with regular books you can feel the heft of the lightness of what you are reading, that you can lend or give them to people, that you can find them half read in the upstairs bathroom and regain interest in them, that you ca easily write on them, or mark them, or not have to charge them or worry that the battery will run out on a long trip, that you can leave them sitting around in a public space while you go get some coffee and no one will steal them for their monetary value (if they get stolen for their literary value, I guess good for the thief), you can throw them around and they won't crack, spilling water on them is not fatal, and dropping them in the pool/toilet/tub won't cost you a fortune to replace them. But most of all, they only do one thing, which is allow you to read them and only them, and not distract you with all sorts of bells and whistles that if you are like me, you have no will power to resist playing with.
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