Thread: What is it with people and their paper books?
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Old 08-17-2010, 06:39 PM   #44
Gwen Morse
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alisa View Post
Often when I hear people wax poetic about the glories of the paper book, they are painting an image of some glorious wood-paneled library with walls full of leather-bound volumes. Cushy wing-back chair, fireplace, retriever at your feet. Basically the sort of thing you would expect to find in a stately home a hundred years ago. Let's face it. While some of us may have a handful of artisanal books gracing our shelves, the vast majority of the books we own are purely utilitarian vessels for text. Maybe they have an interesting cover, but very few books these days have decent paper or bindings. Even a $30 hardback is fuzzy printing on low-grade paper with a cloth binding. I've seen the book collections of my ephemeraphilic friends and they're full of mass market junk. They seem to be sentimental for the library they wish they had rather than the library they do have. The magic in their books is in the stories they contain, not the wood pulp and cheap ink.
I agree with all these points. I mostly read romance novels. I enjoy reading them more than once, but it's not really worth overloading my bookshelves with the "latest" from one of my favorite authors.

My 18 year-old son reads a mix of YA and adult espionage books. He insists on real books, he claims he enjoys the sensual reading experience.

My husband insists on buying books he'll never read, solely for the ability to show off his (always growing) book collection. He likes hardcover books with nice spines/jackets. As a backhanded way of getting more books into his collection, he will deliberately search out obscure books that aren't published as ebooks and request those as gifts (it's a tossup whether he'll read them).

I guess that makes me the outlier of the household, given that I only read paper books when people buy them for me. Amazon needs a way for people to give specific ebooks as gifts (rather than gift cards).
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