Made of Everything You're Not

Truth: I’m a whore when it comes to books. I Just love ‘em. I love the way the feel in my hands, I love the way they smell and I love how I can just lie down with a good one and, somehow, miraculously, that makes a good day. We’ve been hearing for a while how books were going to die and be replaced by the Internet but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. You can’t hold it (no a Kindle isn’t the same), there’s no smell (except warm plastic I guess) and there’s no satisfaction reading a computer all day (in fact, it’s bad for your eyes).

Reading is Good.

I have a special leaning towards hard c0ver books though. Paperback books are good for a trip, I guess (for example a long flight or train ride). But if you want to keep that book, which I always do, then a hard cover book is the way to go. The great thing about hard cover books is that they can be purchased online through Amazon for a fraction of the cover price. There’s a reason Amazon is on top of the online book selling market and it’s not because they rape their customers (are you listening RIAA?)

It used to be that all I had to worry about when buying a book was ensuring it was the hard cover edition. I never cared about edition versions (first, second, yada-yada-yada) or anything but now I have to worry about Large Print Editions (LPE). LPE books are irritating.

Obviously, the print is HUGE. I’m sure they’re made specifically for sight challenged (blind) people but to us who can see it’s a little disconcerting reading text so big. Each page can only contain around 2.5 paragraphs of text. This makes the books big. Like really BIG. It’s irritating holding a normal novel and having so many pages to thumb through.

Apparently, I’ve been living under a  rock all my life because I hadn’t been exposed to LPE books before .

Recently, I bought a book on Amazon which I thought was going to be a nice little addition to my library. Just a guilty pleasure book but one I wanted. I was a good little consumer, making sure it was hard cover, it was being sent from a reputable seller, and that it was in English (don’t ask).

Then it arrives and I’m just bummed. Not because of the book, per se, but because now I have to worry about the format of the text when I’m buying a book.

So as I said, buying a book just got harder. A little, sure, but it’s now one more thing.

Fuck.

Tags: books

This entry was written by Eric Lamb and posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.