As a fiction reader I started very late in life. It was sometime in the last 10 years that I actually got into reading much fiction at all. Of course I read a bunch of non-fiction. I was a cop for 17 years so I read tons of books on the law and investigation techniques. I must have also read and written tens of thousands of police reports. 

But when I had the time to read fiction it was late in life and after years of sitting at computers and doing hundreds of hours of surveillance work my eyes get tired quick. This is particularly true when I read on the computer or my phone. I hate reading on line.

I don't like e-readers. I do have a Nook, but it is the simple one that does nothing but hold books. It has no internet browser for anything else and I bought it because it is the closest thing to a real book that you can get. I bought it because I did not want to be disturbed by emails, site notifications, or anything else on line. I just wanted something I could pick up and read, and the Nook Glow-light was perfect. It's small, light, simple , and even has a background that lights up to read at night. Another advantage of it is (like other e-readers) is that it can hold thousands of books. I have 200 in mine right now.

But you know what? It isn't a book. It just isn't one and never will be. Sometimes when I think of a passage in a book I have read and want to look at again, I know that somewhere in my house that book exists. The page I am looking for exists somewhere, and the words I am looking for are right there on that page. I can see that page in my mind. It is out there in the physical world and I can go back to it anytime I want. It's there and will, barring destruction of some sort, always be there in the same form.  I can hold it and look at it. I can put it away and get it again. It's the words I love and the words I look for. It stands alone somewhere. Not part of some jumbled electronic code in a machine with a bunch of other coded messages. It's a book. It doesn't mix with anything and you can't shove it into small corner of a microchip. You can't hide it with a password or bring it to life with electricity. It's a book. It's always alive. It's always there, waiting for you to come alive.  

The e-book doesn't feel right to me. I know somewhere on my Nook there are thousands of small codes (ASCII code) all set in place to translate themselves into the words of the passage I want to read, but the words are not there in any real way until I turn on the Nook and click the button. The words don't really exist until they are made again with the click of a button. Call me nostalgic or old fashion but ASCII code does not a book make.  It really doesn't. 

The book, the real book, is on the way out. I know this. Someday in the future it will not exist and people there will never know what it is to hold a book of words in their hands. To see them and feel them and to always know they are there. To see it, touch it, and have it tell you about it's journey. 

I feel sad for them already. 

P.S. - To understand how e-books work I went to my Wattpad buddy jeshi99 to get the facts (not that I got them right, but I tried). He's a smart as they get. Check out his book "The Theory of Nothing" where he answers some stuff you probably always thought about but did not know who to ask.