Books or eBooks

I was at the Crossword Book Store yesterday to buy a book that a friend of mine had recommended. Diya was there with me. While looking over some books I casually mentioned about ebooks, and a bunch of sites that operate these days through which you can share the ebooks you own. Diya's counterargument was that with eBooks, you don't get the smell of the books and she cannot read a book without that smell. My (silly) suggestion was that while she read some book, she should keep some hard copy book with her and keep smelling it everytime she felt the need. The argument ended with a laughter.

But later it had me thinking. She did have a point. How many ebooks have I ever read although quite a few would have come across my way at some point or another ? None. And how many paper books had I read ? Every book that I ever read was a paperbook. The fact that I was at Crossword buying a paperback version of a book that I already knew I can arrange an ecopy for speaks that somewhere within me, I don't like ebooks too! Like Diya, I am also a paperbook reader. It's just that I never saw it in black and white.

On deeper thinking, I realised : I am a very irregular reader. Sometimes I feel like reading when I get up, sometimes when I am going to bed, and sometimes when I am not feeling sleepy at all. Hell, there have been situations when I was reading some or the other novel when I was not having any work to do in office ! (OK I shouldn't have done that, but I did). And everytime, its a paper book that I am reading. Carrying around a laptop or a ebook reader like Amazon's kindle can never be as convenient as carrying a real book. I also think that carrying a real book somehow takes you closer to the story.An ebook reader will always be an electronic device, probably another one from Arnie's Terminator gang :p

And if nothing else tilts the balance in favor of paperbooks, there's always the smell of the book that you get when you are reading it. Right Diya ?