Books tell all kinds of stories and books preserve the name of who the stories were written by. Names like Austen, Brontë, Chaucer, Gaskell, Eliot, Swift, Joyce, Barrie, Tolkien, Woolf, Wharton, Plath, Stoker, and Shakespeare would not have been remembered as they do now if not because of their fine works.
Books recounts, exposes, and shed light to historical events...
Books can tell us things – the facts and myths – such as that of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
However, it would seem that real books do face possible extinction in today’s internet world where such a thing called “e-books” are taking over. While the worst we could get out of reading a text on the internet is an eyestrain, now, we are faced with an atrocious-looking device with a computer screen for our viewing pleasure...
Not only will an eyestrain, a headache, and a sore neck soon follow, but perhaps the greatest crime of all is that we aren’t actually reading – in the sense that we are only seeing words, but we are not reading the meaning of the text... as the gadget has taken away our ability to imagine and relate to a scene as we read through a text – something that we can only get by reading an actual book, ink on paper.
Electronic books are therefore to be considered as the lowest form of books and means of reading as it is a selfish way to distance ourselves more from the wonders of real books. We crave perfection – and sophistication to go along with it – and one of the ways we could start achieving that is by taking control of what most of us do a lot of every single day: reading. We do not realise that upon doing so, not only have we thrown away a very valued something that someone else in Africa probably never got the luxury of, but also things such as imagination, emotions, the thrill we get out of predicting and expecting what will happen next as we turn over to the next page, even the satisfaction we get from being able to find a book that seemed impossible to find. And what are we to do when we’ve build up a collection the device breaks and dies? We can always rely on real books for a chance to get into a story as if it was happening to us, to understand the author better, and best of all, real books do not break and die like the rest of electronic devices we own.
These devices are nothing but another invention that is being sold only to the ones that can afford them to feed the massive greed these big electronic companies have. They have already started competing with each other over the exclusivity of what formats of electronic texts can be read on their devices. Companies like Sony, unfortunately, completely disregard these factors as they continue to invent and compete with others for “perfection” over the art of book-reading – which honestly can only be achieved by preserving traditional books for as many more centuries as possible.
Taken from my own blog: http://rizzlerazzle.wordpress.com/
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