I’ve always enjoyed books. Magazines, too. I like to page turn.
So when someone asked about physical books versus ebooks recently in an online forum, I feathered through the pages of my mind to come up with a suitable answer. It’s a celebration of paper and ink!
Here’s Why Books Are Better
If you’re really young, books have surprising pop-up animals and firetrucks that jump out when you open each page! They require no batteries, so your parents won’t have any excuse reading Green Eggs and Ham to you every night, and if they skip a page, you’ll be able to catch them!
All the words are the same as in e-books, so little ones can get a head start, before they turn four and get their own iPhone! Which reminds me, if you spill juicy nutritional baby foods and liquids on regular paper books, they still work.
When you’re a preteen, you can stand on the books to make yourself taller. And if you line the books up on a shelf, people will think you’re smart.
If you go into the legal profession, you can build an entire wall of leather-bound, serious-looking tomes, and probably raise your rates!
When you’re older, you can use hardcovers for self-protection in your home. You’ll have everything you need on your Kindle, but if you’re smart, you’ll hold on to those Dr. Seuss medical reference volumes you collected as a toddler, for at least 40-years, and sell them to a collector! And if you ever lose your Internet, you can use the paper phone book to find the phone number for tech support!
When you open one of those old books, a nick-knack could fall out, like an old concert ticket, or a note to yourself to eat more apples. Important stuff!
When you go to sleep, you can keep a blank paper book by your bedside, but you’ll still need a lamp to write down the ideas that come to you in your dreams. The next day, you can read what you wrote! You can take your dreams and bury the paper book in the backyard, for future historians to dig up, and read about your life, even if there was a nuclear disaster and they didn’t have any batteries.
It might be the look and feel, a little bit of sympathy … the smell, a dab of history … a little love, a little pride … a good, worn cover, a notable inscription … a glossy hardcover featuring your favorite cartoon doctor, with colorful stains from someone’s babyhood … many memories, maybe endearing theories about the fate of a missing page … and always knowing the thing will always boot up!
Paper books are cool! 🙂
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Mark Urso
mark@markursoblog.wpcomstaging.com
@A_Candle_Lit