Paperback or Digital?

It’s certainly an interesting relationship that book lovers have with the Internet - they often break into debate when choosing between the good old paperback novels or using a kindle. Although, an Amazon purchase may just be two or three clicks away, dedicated readers would rather take a trip to their local bookstore. There's a few things about reading a printed book that nothing else can even hope to replicate. That feeling of flicking through the pages, wafting that 'new book smell' is certainly very hard to beat.

I remember forcing my parents to buy me a kindle when I was 12 but it wasn’t entertaining enough for me to even continue reading on it for a month. I took it everywhere with me; airplanes, car rides or even to my friend’s house just so that I could make it a habit. Although I tried to carry on for a year, it never gave me the immense joy I got from flipping over the last page of a physical book and looking back at the number of pages I had just read. Almost a year later, I read from an “actual book” again and it was like the moment you hear a nostalgic song and you are instantly lost in it. The feeling of a print book, with its rough paper and thick spine, is an absorbing and surreal experience - sometimes more so than reading on a device.

It’s always been a hobby of mine to arrange my books every summer and make my bookshelf look as appealing as possible and well as much as I can rearrange on my kindle, nothing really lives up to dusting off several books for an entire day, just to arrange them by colour, author or any way you like. You can call me traditional and old school but I’d rather spend hours at a bookstore trying to find a book instead of scrolling through a website.