Beauty of Printed Books

Books provide me the escape from my otherwise stale routine. Every available opportunity, I would want to bury myself in a book and never come out. Like George R. R. Martin says, books help me live a thousand lives. They make me jubilant and make me cry, they make me care and make me hate, they make me understand and make me wonder; they make me who I am. When books are such an integral part of my life, it’s no wonder I’m finicky about the way I consume books. I’ll use this opportunity to say why print books always are better than e-books.
The beauty on the left
            In recent past, people in both print industry and outside were excited about the explosive growth of e-books. People even went along to predict that, future will be completely dominated by e-books with traditional print books going out of style and they couldn’t have been any more wrong. To everyone’s surprise, last year saw a decline in e-books’ sales and it has been stagnant ever since. This makes one wonder about the initial growth of e-books as to whether it was an organic growth or just another FAD.
            Talking about e-books, one cannot completely deny the advantage they offer over printed books. They are greener product in the way that they use less of paper and thus reduce need for more trees to be cut. They occupy less space – buy a pea sized memory card and you are done for your lifetime book requirement. Inbuilt dictionary & other functions enable one to read books without needing to manage multiple stuff (dictionary, notepad, pen, bookmark, etc). Current advancements also provide the comfort of reading and continuing it in different devices and platforms seamlessly. Most importantly, they have a much longer life than traditional print books. But, even with all these conspicuous benefits, not everything is rosy and sunshine at e-bookville. Like every coin, they have a flip side. While e-books are cheaper, sturdier and universal (compared to print books), they come with a lot of irritants, if I may say so.
Unlike print books, e-books come with a substantial initial investment either in multipurpose electronic devices or dedicated e-book readers. Whenever one uses these devices there comes distractions like games, movies, the internet etc., all trying to share a piece of your quality time. As an artist, e-books provide you more margin than traditional print books; at the same time increasing the risk of piracy. E-books might be a great asset for someone who uses books for reference rather than the pleasure of reading, by providing convenience (in searching specific content, dictionary at a touch, notes without a pen, easy of editing, etc.). But for people like me, for whom the reading is more than a hobby, e-books fail to provide ‘the reading experience’.
When people go on vacation, they can either stay in dingy cheap place or a nice, posh hotels. Even if the former serves the needs, it defeats the purpose. Similarly, even if e-books serve the needs (unfortunately, better than print books), they fail to provide the experience a reader cherishes. A Reader must treasure the alluring aroma of a newly opened book, the feel of the paper in his arms, the excitement in turning the pages, taking care not to crease the cover, the world of marginalia, the comfortable reassuring weight of the book in his hands, the vivacious colours on the cover, satisfaction of seeing them on your shelf etc., that make up the reading experience, which the e-books can never even dream to duplicate. E-books just do not have the magic that a printed version has. Even after reading hundreds of books, I always feel a childish excitement when I buy a new one, which I never have and never will feel with e-books.
All said and done, any format of reading will always be welcome with any ardent reader. No harm in having multiple options, is there? So yeah, both e-books and print books can co-exist. But, when it comes to preference, it’ll always be of traditional print books; because, there’s no replacing the world of feel good factors that keep company with traditional papyrus.

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