the case for (real) books

I heard two troublesome bits in the news last Wednesday the 16th….

First, Borders’ filling of Chapter 11. It’s a reorg, so it could be worse, but they’ll be closing a lot of stores. Not that they were my first choice bookstore, but I hate to see any bookstore fail, and I hope, when they emerge from bankruptcy, they make a comeback.

The other statistic was even more distressing (in my eyes, and I realize I may be the only one who sees it this way) – CBS reported that Amazon now sells more digital books than both hardcover and paperbacks. Experts predict that digital vs. print books will reach 50% each within three years. This makes me sad, and is not a milestone I welcome. I’m no Luddite. I love technology and I keep up to the extent my finances will allow…and to the extent it makes sense.

But books?

Near as I can tell, I’ve been a book lover since birth. I was surrounded by books as a child. I “worked” in my grade school library one summer, cataloging and shelving the new books as they came in. Come to my house now and you’ll see. Two rooms have floor to ceiling bookcases, with a library table so you can pull one off the shelf and read. Another full bookcase is in a back hall. In the kitchen are another 100 or so cookbooks.

Among my collection:

A 1943 edition of The Joy of Cooking, with my mother’s (maiden) name written in it, by her, 1949.
My childhood version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Beatrix Potter’s amazing illustrations).
A 1956 copy of No Children No Pets, which still smells like the sun, where I read it, multiple times.
A 1945 edition of Black Beauty, The Autobiography of a Horse, inscribed in my mother’s handwriting, “To Debbie – from Daddy – September 16, 1961.”
A copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, so old and tattered and yellowed that I can’t find the publication date, but it has my scribbling all over it. I’m guessing the 1930’s or 1940’s.
A 1947 edition of The Lincoln Library of Essential Information, inscribed in my grandmother’s handwriting, “The Fishers, January 12th, 1949.”
And my paternal grandfather’s old bible, his name in the front, dated October 17, 1911, and on the next page, a note from his mother, quoting scripture, dated September 20, 1912. If I have the story straight, he took this bible with him to both World Wars.

So again, what’s not to like about ‘real’ books? They’re tactile. You can scribble in the margins, highlight phrases you like, autograph them, write a note in the cover, let them slide to the floor when you fall asleep reading (how many times do you think your reader will take that kind of abuse?). The old ones have that old book smell. Can you say that about your reader? Curling up with a machine and a blanket and a glass of wine next to a fire just doesn’t sound the same, does it?
Don’t get me wrong; I see use in some cyber-applications. It makes total sense to me to read electronic magazines and newspapers, anything that would typically be disposable anyway. But I read those on a computer or smart phone, not a reader or pad computer. With all of the technology out there (desktop, laptop, pad computers, readers, smart phones, TV’s with computers in them) capable of doing the same thing, isn’t it a matter of time before there’s a convergence of systems anyway? Who needs all those gadgets?

I wandered off point. Sorry.

I tried on line dictionaries and thesauruses, but gave up on them and bought an Oxford thesaurus that I use constantly.

So, when the day comes, my will won’t read “I hereby bequeath all my eBooks to…,” it’ll say “here are all my books, a lifetime’s collection spanning more than 100 years. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.”