Reading . Actual printed on paper books .

[gimme30]

No Kindle or device will ever compare with the pleasure of a real book held reverently in my hands

^^This, so much. Leather bound, gilded edges...kids these days have no idea what they're missing. IF they read at all.

@Innesfan that pic almost (I love New Yorkers, but there's too many of 'em) makes me want to fly out there and set up camp in that store. In Denver we have The Tattered Cover, which is exactly what you'd expect in a good bookstore but without the history. I think they opened in 70, or 71? It's really the only 'proper' bookstore in the whole state.

Curious what you guys have for libraries. Ours have mostly turned into "media centers." Sterile, brightly lit and completely impersonal places. They might have a few actual books, but you can have your choice of any bastardized coffee drink your manbun-capped little head might desire.

For those of you that re-read things, don't you feel like you're missing out? I mean, there's so many books and so little time! I desperately want to read The Agony & The Ecstasy again but there are so many on my want-to-read list I don't feel like I can waste the time.

 

[GaryE]

I agree on the smell of a good book, but then again, I'm part dog.

It's a doomed tech, and it isn't coming back. Reading is going to be electronic going forward. The essence is the same but the experience is shifting as far as the sensuality goes. The history book I'm reading now has to be approached respectfully, because it's from a cheap edition - a paperback great historians series bought second hand in 1980 something. The pages could snap. They're brittle.
The content is brilliant, but I have to read carefully, turning the pages so they don't fall out. I won't read this one again... but the book itself is a metaphor.

With the sometimes obscure bands I like, things from 50 years ago are only just now being digitized. I read somewhere that about 20% of the records ever produced are available in a digital form, which effectively means 80% stand to be lost. A few strike me as not going to be missed, but that's just my taste and it shouldn't decide anything. I expect it's similar with books, and I'd be surprised if a lot of these older histories, a subject not popular in the world the story they analyze got us into, are not available except to specialists now.

There was a burst of aquarium literature in the 1990s that isn't available in digital form. Since our hobby is in decline, it will likely disappear and not show up online. Second hand bookstores were useful for finding offbeat interests that the internet sees as uncommercial.