1. The selection process.

The first step of starting a new book, of course, is deciding what to read. Whether it’s Barnes & Noble, Bookends, an independently owned cozy shop, a library or even just a Newsstand shop nestled in Penn Station, running your hands over the spines of freshly printed books (hard or soft cover, I don’t discriminate!) and feeling the soft, smooth cool glossed covers underneath your fingertips is a sensation that fills the most passionate reader with anticipation. You’re literally in the process of creating a physical relationship with this new mystery book. You want to invest your time in something that’s going to feel good opened across your stomach to the last page you read while falling asleep in bed, something that’ll fit right between your laptop and your chem textbook when you wedge it into your backpack for hopefully a page or two more between classes, a book that belongs in the palm of your hands.

It’s different from buying a book online--you don’t feel anything about the actual book when it lives in cyberspace. Sure, you can give it a test drive by reading an excerpt or its summary on Amazon, but it’s so much more passive in comparison to perusing the aisles. You just swipe left, swipe right, zoom in, zoom out. The end. Part of what makes the publishing industry and book reading exciting is the ways in which authors and publishers can hook a reader with an intriguing book sleeve or provocative cover. You get to be way more picky and closely examine a book when you buy a hardcopy--it becomes yours.

2. Making the book yours.

Now when I say yours, I mean "yours" in the sense that your copy of a book and my copy of a book will never look the same. No matter if we bought it at the same place, have the same edition, our two physical copies will be altogether unique. Some people use bookmarks, some people dog-ear their pages. Carrying around a printed book makes it that much more sacred. You’re worried about dropping it in a puddle, ruining it. Some highlight and write in margins. Spills, food stains, rips, tears, the occasional teardrop or two--your book is transformed into a living thing as it follows you around. The new book smell or comforting musty old book smell changes and the book feels worn, used, loved. You leave an imprint on it as much as you hope it will leave an imprint on you.

As much as we love our phones laptops and tablets, sleep with them or are glued to them, whatever PDF we’ve downloaded or edition we’ve paid for will never carry our marks of usage. The point is for them to be easily portable, quickly X-ed out of and put aside. But when you’ve got a real book in your hands, it’s so much harder to close it and put it down. By the virtues of your mind's eye, you're brought into a world far better than any computer program or .com can bring you. That’s the best part of reading actual books--it’s a good change from the *click, click, click* of every day and your screen brightness burning your eyes.

3. Making the book ours.

Storytelling began as communal orature; written texts are the evolution of tales destined to be shared. There is no nicer feeling than being nestled away in a library or a bookstore to read together. Assign one person as the book holder and another as the page turner. Show one another your favorite genres or trade favorite books. What you like to read says a lot about your personality type and so does the criteria off of which you choose your books. You become more aware of others in reading with them--you sense the warmth of them sitting next to you, hear their soft breathing, feel your fingertips brushing against each other’s and also the pages, you glance at them to see if they’ve gotten to the end of the page so you can flip.

You can share a book together, trade them off, you can hand them to your neighbors or you can send them across the country. Books have been passed down from generation to generation, some are even older than we are.

My most treasured literary possession happens to be a 1900s leather-bound pocket copy of Hamlet by William Shakespeare that was printed in London, England. It’s basically every English major’s and/or Shakespeare nut’s dream to possess something like this. The pages are frayed, thin, yellowed with age. Somehow 100+ years of printed legacy ended up here with 20-year-old me in 2015 New York City. I think of all the hands that have held it, discussions it’s sparked, memories it’s made for others, and I’m astounded.

Can your Kindle app for the iPhone 6s do that?

You can’t really “share” an e-book in the same ways that you can share a physical copy of a book.

It breaks my heart to see that the Barnes & Noble across from my campus has become a TJMaxx (even though I love clothes); I’m saddened to think that one-day people might not be putting hardcover copies of their favorite reads on display at home on bookshelves or mantles. Books are as much decorative as they are informative; they have such a multiplicity of functions that I hate to see minimized in our tech-savvy world.

Don’t get me wrong, I upload and download, tag and share online like nobody’s business. I love the Internet. I also think that online reading is a great way to spread a limited resource across a broad spectrum of consumers and fanatics, as well as to enable sales and popularity on a global scale that transcends the tangible.

Call me a sentimentalist, but I simply prefer a good old-fashioned book any day.

Active reading tugs at my heartstrings in ways that are so much more complex than just squinting at my phone screen.

Books are the best.