Endangered Books
Book is dying…
Book served us well,
But now Book is retiring.
For years, Book is the top star,
But now Book is fading.
It hit me hard when my younger sister refused to buy a book. She is the epitome of a bookworm. However, now, she does not see the point in buying a book when it is all stored in her Kobo Reader. It broke my heart.
She did not know that I developed a minor competition with her: who has the most books in our bookshelves. Since I was older, I had a head start with my collections; but my sister still managed to defeat me. Her collection has me turning Shakespearean green with envy. In fact, I love standing in front of her bookcase, trying to decide which one I would love to read. We dreamed -planned-a long time ago to build a massive library analogous to the one in Disney’s Beauty & Beast. At present, with our book collections combined, we can fill up a small room full of books. But it stops for her…
It breaks my heart to see Book struggling to exist.
It drives me to tears to see Book unwilling to survive.
Somehow I blame technology for this. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology. I cannot live without my iPhone and my netbook. It drove me crazy when our microwave broke down (how can I eat warm food now?!). Yet, technology is killing print books. I will not be surprised if twenty to thirty years from now children see print books as “ancient”. My five-year-old niece loves to read; but most of the children’s books she has read are on the computer. Her mom, my cousin, is a computer expert. So it makes sense that she will also raise her kids in the presence of the almighty-computer.
But back to my sister… just now I see her snuggled in her bed, reading from her Kobo Reader. She was reading one of the Harry Potter books. I had to recover from a fake heart attack since I could not fathom why she needed to read it on her Kobo Reader when she had the books in her bookshelf. She told me it is a new experience for her to read her favourite book in her Kobo Reader. I could only shake my head in disbelief. I think back to the time when my sister went missing late at night. At that time, my grandmother was visiting and she slept beside my little sister. My grandmother panicked because my sister was gone. It turned out she was hiding inside a walk-in closet, flashlight in her hand, reading her Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She said she did not want to wake up our grandmother, but she could not put the book down. That book she was reading was my grandmother’s. It was already a very, very old. According to my grandmother, the copy she had was one of the earliest printed copies, given to her by an American seminarian.
The book had this distinct smell. But when you hold it, you could feel the time that had passed by. You could feel the changing years the book witnessed.
How I hope Book survives
How I pray Book remains
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Blog post assignment submitted to TCN 705