The last quote that made me stop, think and reminisce was from Ray Bradbury. A Time magazine writer recently asked the 90-year-old sci-fi icon if he owns a Kindle or another e-reader. He said:
I don't believe in those. They don't smell. A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.
Doesn’t that take you back? Maybe to your grade school years, to a little, slightly underfunded library full of tattered paperbacks and every horse story a girl could read. Best of all, though, there was the Dewey Decimal System. Man, if you spilled one of those card-catalog drawers it was hello wrath of Librarian Lady and goodbye lunch break for six months.
Those were the days, though. Books, old and new, lined shelves higher than you could reach. The smell was great.
A plastic e-reader just doesn’t have the same gravitas or character that a hardbound book does. And if you you’re lucky, a book’s previous readers have lightly scribbled their own thoughts in its margins. Try writing and sharing on a Nook or a Kindle.
Bradbury added that there are: “Too many junky things around. There are too many computers, too many e-mails, and too many devices. They get in our way, and prevent us from reading. If we didn’t have the computers and the e-mails, we could spend more time reading and writing.”
Sometimes I want the days I spent at the library back—the days before anyone had imagined the Internet and electric “books.” Kids today, it seems, are missing out on something. Something more substantial than a computer screen and Google.
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