Books

Today there was this great book sale at a local library, which was awesome. Well, I thought it was awesome. Browsing around, I found a couple of books with the previous owner's name written in the front cover, with the date that they received it. 1972. 1968. Such books were in extraordinary condition too. And after looking browsing the sale and purchasing a calculus textbook with the student manual, 2 programming books, 3 other books, 3 music CDs, and the box set of Star Wars and the Matrix on VCR (both of which I still have yet to see), I was thinking.

E-books are getting more popular these days, and it's great! You can practically carry around many books without having to carry around all those books. Who would want to carry several 2 to 4 pound textbooks when you can just carry around all of them with a Kindle? It's great! But there's just something nostalgic and tangible a book carries that an arrangement of 0s and 1s cannot match. A digital copy of a book is just a digital copy, but a physical book means more than that. There was an owner, it actually took up noticeable physical space, you could flip and turn the pages, the paper could be old and worn, it could have that unmistakable cover you always saw before you opened the book, and the book, if it was old, has probably been to many places you haven't been. It's a book.