Whatever Happened To Just Plain Old Reading?

Do I talk too much about books?
I mean, after all, we are a library full of those bound pieces of paper. And we do have stacks and stacks of them all over this building.
Last night while listening to TV, I read a short piece in an old magazine I'd kept for two years about electronic readers.
An electronic reader is supposed to do for books what the iPod did for music. (Yes? And that was?) You can purchase downloadable books for an average of $10. Now, that doesn't sound too bad.
With the Amazon Kindle, material is transmitted wirelessly in just a few seconds. You can access about 300,000 titles of not only books, but magazines, newspapers, and blogs. And the Kindle 2 only costs you $300. Now, that sounds
bad!
A Sony Reader requires a computer with a USB cable to download books from the Sony eBook Store. The Pocket costs only $200 and the Touch is $300. Wow! For me, that's not good either.
Even Barnes and Noble has an e-reader available for your iPhone, Blackberry, PC, or Mac. Their titles cost as little as 99 cents. However, if you're using these little devices, you need to be wary of sites where you can obtain books for free, because there could be copyright issues.
And now...now we have the iPad. Just came out.
Whatever happened to just plain old reading? That means picking up a bound stack of paper, still called a book, a plain old book, and reading it?
Someday we're going to miss sitting someplace, like the coffeehouse or park or in the sunshine on our front porch, and holding a great book, feeling the weight of its bound solidness, touching the smoothness of each page, and smelling that undeniable smell of a good paper
book.
It just doesn't feel the same when we hug an iPhone or iPad. There's something special about hugging a book and enjoying just plain old reading.