5 Quotes Tagged: e-books

It is, incidentally, a favour that e-books have done for the Good Bookshop: they have made books beautiful again. A few years ago, book covers could be rather drab affairs: the title and the author's name printed over a stock photograph of something Vaguely Relevant. If you wanted to read it, you had to take it as it was. Whereas now, in these new and glorious days when the margins on physical are that little bit higher than on the electrical alternative, publishers produce exquisite bindings. Bookshops haven't been this pretty for at least a century.

(in response to the question: what do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?)

Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.

the problem with reading off a screen isn’t resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it’s that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical.

I've got to stop being such a snob about leather-bound books, he reminded himself. E-books do have their moments.