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I'll have my books with pages, please.

ereader plus lisa doesn't equal love

It's ironic, technophile that I am, I still don't use an e-reader and am digging in my heels to keep my physical books.  I guess eventually I'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming to surrender to the future.  Wonder how long it will be before books as we know (knew?) them will be a thing of the past, left to be whispered about in museums? Mommy, why did people turn down the corners of the paper and write beside the words? What is the paper called again- pages?

To me, there's just nothing like wandering the aisles of the library or the bookstore.  I love the smell of the paper, picking up the books and skimming through them, seeing what catches my eye. Many times I pick out a book just like I shop: swoop in, quick scan, see if something catches my eye, if not it's on to the next one.  How can I do that with an e-reader? It's just not the same, I whine as the violin plays softly in the background.

Yes, I've tried e-readers and the thought of having all of my books with me all the time is alluring, but I just haven't been able to turn that initial attraction into a desire to enter a long-term relationship.  I'm just not in love.  Will I ever be? I wonder as I imagine myself an old lady who lives in a world that she can't relate to, surrounded by her old books.

I really don't know what my hangup is with books - and also with buying them in a physical store or checking them out of a library.  Yes, I do order books occasionally online but much prefer actually picking them up, feeling their weight, turning the pages to see if we click. Maybe I'm just clinging on to my one last little vestige of the past.

I do find it ironic since technology is what saved me from a life of misery working in accounting. It's hard to believe that I've been developing websites 17 years now - much longer than I worked in accounting, for which I have a bachelor's degree and CPA certificate to vouch for my credentials, though I could really care less. Accounting just doesn't do it for me; never did, but I tried to convince myself for a few years that it did.  But the internet did from the first moment I met it.

Maybe there's still hope that I'll meet the e-reader that's right for me.  After all, I hated programming in Fortran and BASIC but was able to keep an open mind for the web programming languages. Until then I'll stick with my beloved books.

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