It's all about having something tangible...

I love books. In my early 20s when I was at University I worked part-time in "The Bookshop" (underneath the Crowtree Leisure Centre at the time). Each Saturday, Steve, the owner, would give me my wages and I'd then show him a stack of books I'd put aside during the week. Steve would nod sagely and take the money back.There's something very comfortable about a bookshop, especially a 2nd hand one. Here, books, no longer loved seek out new owners who will take them away and love them once more. I have fostered many a tatty copy of a well-thumbed early Philip K Dick or Frank Herbert in my time. Occasionally, usually due to lack of space, I have had to release a book or two back into the wild. It's never easy.My dad already knows that his book collection is to become mine when he finally shuffles off this mortal coil, for we have completed many a series by buying them for each other as Christmas and Birthday presents, so our tastes are shared and so are our books.So today, when I moved our biggest book case out from underneath the stairs out into the living room and was thus forced to spend several hours making it presentable (removing the double stacks, sorting into some kind of author based order) I wondered about the rise of the e-Book and the e-Book reader.Will these days eventually become distant memories? Stories told to grandchildren who stare incredulously in much the same way as my ten year old currently stares at the big black flat disc called a record when I get the box of vinyl out. Will they simply use their smart phone issued token/voucher to download the latest blockbuster to their Kindle as a Christmas or birthday present? Never to know what it feels like to pick up a present from under the tree and know that it's a book, but to not know what book. To listen to the gentle flap-flap-flap-flap as you flick through a hundred pages in a few scant seconds. To miss out on teasing the olfactory system and to not know the smell what a new book smells like. To never stand in a queue clutching your newly purchased tome reading it as you shuffle forward waiting for your idol to add their signature to the inside front cover and, if you were lucky, a personal word or two. Perhaps, in years to come, e-Book readers will come with a finger print scanner or a touch sensitive pad where authentication that you stood in that queue can be added electronically...It's odd that I, self confessed techno-geek, lover of all things electronic, find myself torn by the relatively sudden rise of the e-Book (and reader) phenomenon. To this end, when my friend and fellow writer Drew Wagar published his first pay for novel (the rest have been available as free downloads) I paid for the much more expensive print-on-demand copy.I am not yet ready to embrace the electronically printed word, not for my books at least...