A book is a…
A tool wielded by an individual in their own unique way.
This tool exercises your brain, your emotions, and your true existence. Maybe
that’s a bit dramatic, but books do open up a lot of doors for us. They enhance
our creativity, our vocabulary, even our opinions. Sometimes a book can be read
by a thousand people, it contains the same words on the same pages (relatively
the same pages depending on the type of tree I’m assuming) and yet the words
can be interpreted in a different way for all of the readers. It doesn’t matter
if your interpretation is completely out there, at least you were thinking for
a moment. It’s quite different than the mindless intake of social media, or
even movies. Movies just make you mad because the director uses what HE saw
when HE read the book and puts that on screen instead of the way you saw the
characters or the places in your mind when you read. Books are puzzles with a million solutions. These puzzles
bring even the best jigsaw puzzle masters down to the same level as even the
most puzzled puzzler because everyone is right. Reading the different views on
that paper I see mostly my own views. I totally agree when Nancy Jo Sales said “There’s
something about the physicality of a book, the way it looks and feels and even
smells” because I know I love that new book smell way more than the smell of an
iPad. If iPads have a smell. There’s an app for that. I also agree with the
idea of the electronic copies taking away the uniqueness of each individual
book. They make a book such as Peter and the StarCatchers, a book with
lightly ripped and ridged pages all of slightly different lengths and turn it
into a screen with words the same size as every other book. Finally the main
reason for me that I hate the electronic books and love the physical copies is
progress. I love seeing the pages fly by and being able to see the progress
over the days as more and more of the story is on the left, behind me, and the
end is approaching fast on my right. Books will not disappear, I hope, because
of the beautifully written stories they all hold and the ability to pass down
stories that you loved so much to your kids or friends. I have all of my books I
have read and someday I’ll pass them on to my kids so they can create fantastical
worlds in their heads just as I did, I can share these tools with them by
simply passing the copies from my hand to theirs (something not quite as easy
with an app on iTunes because dang, it’s real hard to share from iTunes
accounts now-adays).
