Books

Coming home from my first writers group meeting the other night where the discussion had turned to ebooks, I realized that I've never weighed in on them.  Let me start by saying, because I have friends and co-workers on both sides of this, that I support all of it.  The entry below is simply my own, personal feeling on books.

Ebooks are the talk of my workplace by times and everyone is waiting to see things like "ebook erosion" or the second coming of itunes.  From person to person opinions are widely varied on ebooks.  The general consensus seems to be that an ereader makes a very practical travel companion, that the price point is enticing and that a certain type of book can be pretty much permanently justified in this format.

However, the lingering physical qualities of books are still spoken of with quiet reverence.  I often wonder if this nostalgia will fade over generations but I sincerely hope it doesn't.

I have loved computers and the internet since infancy.  Having a gamer Dad meant I could navigate DOS menus even before being able to read.  I spend hours reading social media, hunting down music, writing, LJ'ing, blogging, collecting inspirational photos and reading oodles of fanfiction.  I'm not sure how I lived before my iphone.  I even have the Kobo app. but I have never used it.  I have never read an ebook.

I still love books.  I love the idea that once you have crafted a tale you craft its container in equal measure.  I love the feel of questing through a bookstore and seeing, really seeing, all the possibilities. It's humbling to realize you probably can't ever read them all.  It reminds you you are tiny with a heart's appetite bigger than your body can contain.  I love a good bookshelf and I love looking at other people's.

Music stores, I must confess, always held some intimidation for me.  There was a certain element of being seen with certain music or, perhaps a better way of saying it, identifying yourself very strongly by your choice of genre.  (not that there isn't book judgement, ha ha, oh how there is)  However, I wasn't sorry to make my music buying experience private.  I didn't seem to lose a sense of happiness from bouncing from artist to artist with my own karma and people rarely recommend music I like.

But if bookstores vanished it would be like entire parklands disappearing too.  People come into a bookstore with a certain amount of openness I think and a desire to touch and feel what they are looking for.  It has never stopped being special to read a book.  No awards, or celebrity nods, or author fads or movie adaptations can ever overtake it completely.  The ritual of sitting down to read still comes with the idea that you turn everything else off and just relax.  If you're me, your favorite books will, if left untouched, open automatically to favorite parts.

And lastly, perhaps there is still some magic in books being fashioned on paper.  I found a great LJ icon that says "Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart".  Every breath out is a tree's breath in and vice versa.  How many breaths went into the page you are reading, in every possible way?  And I don't say this as someone that is terribly alert or alarmed by what things are made of (each New Year's renews my socially unconscious half-hearted environmentally aware guilt).  But there is still some awe built into books.  For all the times you hear wind rustling leaves, or you collect them off the ground and press them between book pages.  For that moment as you get older when you revisit a place and realize the trees are four times as tall as they were when you were a child.

Trees whisper and beckon and offer a bevy of texture, sight and sound.  We always feel a yearning at some time or another to be close to them.  And a good bookstore feels much the same.