Quothe the Raven 'Nevermore'

Yesterday, while looking online for a book I want to buy, I came across a page where the Kindle price was less than half of the standard price. And I remembered: "Oh yeh, those exist." I had never really given e-books much thought before, because I can't stand reading on screens. However, for some reason I felt compelled to click on the "what is a Kindle" button, and I did.

It was only then that I was introduced to the entire world of e-books. I discovered pages talking about the sheer number of trees that can be saved with e-books, the ease of buying books, the number of free books you can get (thousands of classics), the money you can save buying books, and the fact that you don't have to carry them around in your backpack (which can be ridiculously heavy). I also realized that you can read PDFs on them, meaning that course packets would be unnecessary, and I would have saved almost $130 on course packets alone already. I did come to a conclusion after a little bit though:

Not until e-books
Can emit an old book smell
Will they be mainstream


Right now, I can grab about a third of the books in front of me, open them up and smell the wondrous smell of old books. I can turn the pages, I can see the remnants of prior readings on folded down pages and underlined passages, and, most importantly, I can feel the feel of having a book in my hand. With that, I formed my opinion on e-books. E-books are fantastic. But for certain things. If I need to buy hundreds of dollars of books for a semester's worth of classes, I could probably save hundreds with e-books, as well as getting to keep them, and not having to carry them around. I can still mark and highlight pages, and streamline work needing to be done for school. I can avoid buying course packets and wasting hundreds of pages of paper printing handouts sent to me by teachers. It's really a fantastic tool for certain scenarios. But, at the end of the day, if I want to curl up with a nice book by the fireplace- I'm not going to read a Kindle. I'm going to grab my 30 year old copy of The Lord of the Rings, with dog-eared pages and the fantastic feel that having a nice book in your hands gives you. Books will still be alive for years to come, because e-readers simply cannot fully replace the satisfaction that reading a book gives you, and they certainly don't give you the feel of bookmarking a page and saying to yourself "look at that, I've read 2/3rds of the book." In my world, the two are not and do not have to be mutually exclusive.