I Love Books - Paper and eBooks

Will the children of today be the eBook readers of tomorrow?

Emphatically, yes. Will we, as their parents and grandparents, speak the same literary language they do? I assert that we must. We must embrace the new digital format for reading books and continue to read into the future, as leaders in a new literary country. And this is not a country for nostalgic resistance. Pick up your iPad or your Sony Reader proudly. Save the book stores that you love by buying paper books and using their websites as your source for downloading your digital books. Download, save, read, notate, enlarge, consume the words as never before. Become e-savvy. Choose to join the wave and don’t be left behind in the papered world of old books that must crumble to dust, as all things worldy must. Open your mind to the possibilities.

As a book seller at Village Books I’ve heard arguments on both sides of this issue. The romantic booksellers say, ‘No, nothing will ever satisfy like a paper book, with pages to turn, pages to write one’s thoughts on the margins, to carry in one’s hand.’ However, I will own both: paper books and eBooks. Nothing can diminish the physical beauty of the paper books I’ve filled my home with, the books I carry everywhere I go, the books I read in bed late into the night.

And yet… And yet, I also love the new technology. I will download a portable library to take with me, in my back pack, with my water bottle, with my writing journals, and I will continue to feed my book-hungry brain with the tools of our new age. My iPad will become my new portable bookshelf.

What will I download first? Shakespeare? Mary Oliver’s poetry? The Zen texts of Thich Nhat Hanh? How about the new biography of Teddy Roosevelt? How about a Sudoku book?

I recently read a study in which children, who are reluctant readers, will actually read more books on a digital reader than an intimidating book with many pages. The answer to the teaching of literacy to recalcitrant young students may actually be in a electronic hand-held device. If that is what it takes to get kids to read, I’m all for it. Remember, it is the message, as well as the medium, that prevails. It is the words, the story, not the physical book that we absorb. Words trump book.