The Power of the Printed Word

A recent jaunt through my friendly neighborhood bookstore found me paging through Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow. Eastern Standard Tribe also caught my eye. Cory Doctorow has his own web site--www.craphound.com--and all of his books are available as free downloads and licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons. There it was, all of the information I needed to get the books I was looking at absolutely free of charge, and yet, I still walked out with books. There is just something about the smoothness of the cover with its unique artwork, the texture of the pages, that "new book" smell. The concept of the electronic book readers, such as the Sony Portable Reader, intrigues me as a fun gadget, but somehow it's just not the same if there aren't pages to turn and passages to underline and margins to annotate.


Incidentally, I am about sixty pages into Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and am reminded of Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. Weird, but good.