In this day and age of technology everywhere, it was only a natural progression for all of our books to end up on small screens in front of us, but not I. I love the feeling of a physical book in front of me. I love the smell and community of bookstores. I love secondhand books that already have their own story that is not typed on the pages.
As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in a Barnes and Noble’s Starbucks at 10 o’clock. There are three languages being spoken around me, all conversations about the books they are reading (at least the two languages that I understand are). When I walked in the door, the smell of books greeted me first, and three different people who recognized my face from my weekly trips here followed soon thereafter. Families are hanging out in the kid section with the children eagerly picking up books to read over the summer. You can’t exactly get this feeling looking for a book to read on a screen.
Bookstores have become my second home. There is nothing quite like the smell and feeling of walking into an old bookstore. I travelled to Nashville last summer, and even in a city eight hours away from home, I found a second-hand bookstore and a few extra minutes to browse. When I say a few extra minutes, I mean that one of my friends had to drag me out after about half an hour of looking at books. All of my family and close friends know that I am not to be left unsupervised in a bookstore, because there goes my entire paycheck.
If you look at any copies of my favorite books, there are highlighted passages, notes in the margins, and the spine may or may not be falling apart. These features give the books their own story that have nothing to do with the words that are on the pages. In some, there are stains from coffee or tea. Sand trapped between pages reminds me of the times that I have taken these books to the beach. The tell-tale sign of water damage - wavy pages - mark a few of the books, showing their history of being dropped in the bathtub. Bringing an e-reader into the tub always runs the risk of killing it forever. With physical books, it is nothing that a hairdryer cannot solve.
In this day and age, we are all attached to screens the vast majority of the time. If one simple switch can lead to less screen time, it is a good thing for our health. Science has shown that before going to sleep, you should avoid lit screens, like those of televisions, phones, and e-readers.
At the end of the day, there is no way that holding an e-reader is comparable to the feeling of holding a worn in copy of your favorite book, anything from “The Outsiders” to Shakespeare and anything in between.
