Mourning The Printed Word

I love books.  I love newspapers.  I love magazines.

I like to feel a book in my hands.  I like the smell of new books.  I sometimes like the smell of old books.  I like being able to turn pages, use a highlighter or underline stuff (in my own books, of course) and I like how books look arranged on bookshelves.

If you were to visit a Barnes & Noble today...right now...you would probably laugh at the prediction I'm about to pose: Books are on their way out and will not be printed in less than fifty years.  Those books that remain will be relics of a time past.  I welcome the progress wrought by technology but I think I'd miss my books more than anything.  I think magazines are on their way out even sooner than books and I think that we may see our last printed newspapers in five years or less. 

I guess there are other things to mourn with the onset of technological advances...most of them with an attitude of "good riddance," but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for books.

I remember my geeky childhood, sitting in the reference room at the Johnsonburg Public Library (then located in a wonderful early Twentieth Century building known as the Johnsonburg Community Building) on rainy days enjoying the simple pleasures of just getting something down off the shelf for the heck of it, and reading for sheer pleasure.  The pictures, vast amounts of information, world travel...they were all at my fingertips.  I could never have imagined the incredible resource we have today in the form of the internet, but that was how my mind wandered as a child.  Books were my friends.

I love my computer.  I'm glad I can use it for so many things.  But I still can't seem--even with the Nook and Kindle--to bring myself to even say the words.  It just doesn't sound right.  "It's a nice cold, wet day.  I think I'm going to go cuddle up in the corner with my Nook."  I think I'll still prefer "It's a good day to go cuddle up in the corner with a few books."