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The Love of Books

Hello everyone!

Our shopping cart is back online (it has been for awhile, but we are excellent at procrastinating and often fail to efficiently convey information), and we’ve also slashed the prices of our paperbacks LIKE CRAZY.

On another note, these are saddening days for book lovers as we witness the demise of physical books. With the rise of the ebook, physical books are becoming not more scarce, but more unwanted. They take up too much space, are larger than an iPad, and basically serve no practical purpose in a digital world where reading does not require paper.

It’s sad but true – ebooks really have rendered physical books pointless, except in cases where harder-to-find titles can’t be found in ebook formats, or where books are treated as collectibles rather than sources of information.

But of course, there are still those of us who don’t like thinking of books as pointless – we, the staunch defenders of THE REAL BOOK, cannot bear to see books forgotten and discarded, just as we cannot bear to see those we love left out and insulted.

And many from the younger generation (teenagers and children) simply cannot understand our defense of such cumbersome creatures as BOOKS. And really, there is no way to rationally state a case for them.

There is only one reason for holding on to physical books, and that is love. Love cannot be defined, and therefore, love for books cannot have any justification but that of love itself. The pleasure of flipping pages and clutching a book different from all other books, and the pleasure of smelling a new book, an antiquarian book, an old book, a book you’ve kept for so long it bears your scent. And knowing that this object, the archetypal BOOK, has existed for thousands of years.

And unfortunately, the digital world just does not have such sensory enticements. Maybe it will bring other joys, and maybe in fifty years people will lament the demise of the digital age the way we lament the gradual disappearances of books. Nevertheless, reading a book is an experience that cannot be replaced.