[Timboli]

Originally Posted by barryem

Back when all books were made of paper the term "book lover" referred to people who love books and to people who love reading. I think these days we need a new term to describe people who love reading because they don't all LOVE books.

Very true and I agree.

Music has gone through a similar revolution, where you could say many love the sound of certain pieces of music, rather than the musicality or skilful performance. I can well remember a time, when many were quite happy to say they weren't into music. Now it is around us everywhere, and people associate tunes with all sorts of things ... events, emotions, etc. So most now like some kind of music ... if not for what you would call musical reasons.

I've always thought of myself as a book lover and yet all my life I've bought books, read them and passed them on in some way. I rarely kept books I'd read unless it was to find someone to share it with. And then they were gone.

I was like that for a while, due to funds, but eventually I regretted it and bought back most of what I had sold or passed on. Which was quite a task once upon a time, especially here in AUS. In fact, it was only a relative few years ago, that via the Internet, I was able to purchase many long sort after books via overseas Library sales. A few years later, not long after I had gotten virtually all, I got my first ereader, and could have avoided that state of affairs for many, especially with sites like The Gutenberg Project. I'd been collecting ebooks from them for years, in the hope of one day getting a good ereader.

And then some people have kindly provided hard to get books as ebooks (i.e. Biggles).

I've never been a note-taker so I never wrote in books are marked them but I never minded folding the corner down to mark a page. And I nearly always read paperbacks and had my current book in my back pocket and i was pretty hard on those books. Fussy people didn't want them when I finished.

I used to buy a lot of second hand books, some of which I still treasure greatly. One thing that really angered me though, was notes written by people in the margins or amongst the text. I saw and still see that as abuse. Folding down corners, while not as bad, was still a milder form of abuse in my eyes. So yes, I was one of those so-called fussy people.

So I think I'm probably not a book lover but a lover of reading; a lover of stories.

While I am definitely both.
If a book looked great, I could buy it, without any definite intention to read ... cost & sense permitting. Of course, I'd probably say to myself, that I must read it one day, while knowing full well that was highly unlikely.