For the Love of Books! (But the Hatred of eBooks)

I recently acquired an iPad. I say acquired because I did not purchase it, but rather it was a bonus for paying the $3,000 that week for the bar review course I was already going to pay for (on a side note, how frustrating is it that I have to pay about $150,000 for my law school education, then $1500 or thereabouts to take the bar exam (including $500 for an FBI criminal background check) and THEN $3,000 for a course to make sure I pass the bar?-- bogus). Back to the point, so I now have an iPad. For the record, I never really wanted one. I have a MacBook and I have an iPhone, so my life was complete. I didn't need an iPad and I didn't want it. Now that I have it though, I have to say, I love it. It's nice, it's convenient, it has a good battery life, and it's fun to play games on, and I've also discovered ebooks. Which brings me to the real meat of this rant--I hate ebooks.

I do not welcome the day we switch over to this newfangled electronic generation where printed books don't exist. And while I openly admit that I have some ebooks on my iPad, I will say I have not paid a dime for any of them (they were free books from the iBooks store) and I will not pay money for ebooks. I don't know how many people out there are like me, but when I say I'm a bibliophile, I mean I love the PRINTED page. Yes, ebooks are convenient. Yes, it's nice to have them all "at the touch of your finger" and if all my books were ebooks, moving would be a more pleasant but still annoying task. However, in my opinion there are few things better than the feeling of a book in my hands. As a kid who coveted the library Beast had (in Beauty and the Beast), I cannot imagine a world where said library wouldn't even be a fantasy.  To this day I still want a huge castle in the French countryside (or maybe English because I don't speak any French) with a huge library just like this:

I can't imagine a better room. I love everything about the printed page. A printed book is glorious. I love the smell of a new book, so crisp and inky; just begging to be read and known. And the way a well worn in book smells, too, is fabulous; musty and full of history. The look and the texture of books, too, is wonderful. Each one is different. Different binding, different cover art, different pages. Smooth cut pages, rough cut pages, tiny compact paperbacks, or big chunky hardback. Printed books are interesting. I also love how tangible it is. There's none of this variety with an eBook. They're all the same, only the "reader" makes any difference. There's no real shelving the books, there's no real turning of the pages, there's no smell, there's no wear. You can't look at an eBook and tell any history. You look at a real book and you can tell a lot about the owners. The well worn spine of a favorite book, read and reread, can't be seen in an ebook reader. The coffee stains, the dog-eared pages, and the ripped corners-all which add character and tell another story all together- can't be seen on an e-Reader. And this is what we lose when we switch to the electronic age. When we only buy books in such a fictitious format, there's no passing the book down. There's no writing a personal message on the inside cover to a loved one, hoping they'd enjoy the book as much as you did. Printed books are communal, meant to be shared, enjoyed, and eventually passed on to the next generation. Can you do any of that with an ebook? No. So while technology pulls us together in unexpected ways through facebook and other social media, with the transition to ebooks, part of our community may be lost. I can't imagine this. I love the printed book and that is why I will not buy an ebook if I can help it. My iPad is for books I already own in real form or books that are free or books I don't care to ever own or pass on. I just hope someday that any children I may have will know the joy of a printed book so that they too may dream of having Beat's library, because I still do.