Why I will probably never own an e-reader.

(You can blame both the spiel and the double whammy!post on Aurora. She started it.)

Don't get me wrong. I can see why e-readers are popular: convenient for traveling and storing multiple (hundreds of) e-books, reduced prices on those e-books, and for those of us in the Northwest (the hippie capital of the country), it's generally a "greener" way to read -- with the added bonus of being sleek and shiny technology. I get why people buy them.

I just don't see myself ever owning one. Can't say for certain, of course, but I have a hard time imagining it. Because the thing is: I like books. I like the musk of the pages (whether old or new), and the texture against my fingers. I like the shape and heft of a book in my hand. I like to underline my favorite passages and write in the margins. There's even something strangely pleasing about certain font types, and the arrangement of words on the page -- particularly when it comes to poetry. I like to look at the covers of books. The old truism about never judging a book by its cover? I do. Always. The cover art of a book is a huge draw to me. It's one of the things I love about aimlessly perusing bookstores -- seeing all the books lined on the shelves, just waiting to be picked up, flipped through, seen and handled in a way that has no equivalent in an e-book. I also like the fact that reading a book is not reading a screen. As someone who works on a computer for eight hours a day, five days a week, I don't want to look at yet another screen to read for pleasure.

And if we want to talk about practicality for a moment, books still one-up e-readers in several ways: I don't have to worry about dropping a book too hard. It's okay if I accidentally spill a drink on it; it might be water-stained afterward, but it will probably still be legible (and even if it's not, I don't have to drop $200 to replace it). A paperback is probably not an object of interest to a thief, and again, if it does get stolen, I can re-buy it for less than $200. A book can last you a lifetime; you can pass it down from one generation to the next (I own an old, musty copy of a Hardy Boys book given to my dad when he turned 10 years old -- there's still a note from his aunt on the front flap). E-readers, like all other forms of technology, will constantly be outdated -- there will always be new versions to buy. Sleek and shiny though they are, they are costly bits of programming that are not made to last.

So, while I hope that people with e-readers enjoy them and use them, I'll stick to my paperbacks with the notes in the margins.