Buying Books – Are You Going For Printed Books Or eBooks?

Is this a matter of preference? Because it sure does sound that way now that I take a good look at it. We are more inclined to just want to buy an electronic book where we format it to our reading needs, not to mention that we can take it anywhere and it is completely easy to use. It is also portable and convenient.

BUT what about the printed books? The kinds of books we all grew up using? The paperweight that most of us were really annoyed carrying all the time? What about them?

Personally, I like eBooks more but only because my phone can store so many stories without making me feel like I’m carrying a whole library in my pocket. Currently, I have about 250 books in phone and that is not including that reading apps that I downloaded for my fanfiction needs. Each reading app has about over a hundred or two stories in them too. Do you see me groaning about how heavy my bag is because of all the books I carry all the time? Of course not.

The Magic of Printed Books

BUT (yes, another but)with all of us using our phones all the time and most of us even preferring to read using them, the novelty of portability and convenience already ran out a few years ago, let’s be honest. Not to mention that we all have shorter attention span now since we could do a lot of things on our phones. “I’ll just read it later, I have it bookmarked on my phone anyway”, “Oh my favourite You Tubers just uploaded, let me just this out then I’ll continue reading later.” And so on and so on.

I’m not going to lie, a few years ago I found myself absurdly excited when someone gave me a book. A REAL one. After reading stories on my phone and spending most of my allowance on eBooks I wouldn’t even read, I got really happy and excited when I got my hands on that lovely paperweight again. The smell of crisp books brought me back to my high school days when I and my best friend would go to our school library just to borrow old books from there. And the beautiful smell of old books and creaky floorboards made me wish I was back to being 13 again.

I finished the book in less than a day despite the fact that it was over 500 pages long. I ended up buying real books for myself afterwards too. It was a great investment for me because collecting them made me feel great. You never really see a proper proof on your phone that you’ve finished a couple of books already, unlike the real ones you would stash on your shelf. Seeing all of those books on my shelf made me feel proud of myself because I actually managed to finish them all.

So if I was to go shopping for books again? Well, for convenience’s sake, of course I’d go for eBooks. However, if I ever want to take the time to get to know the book and its contents a lot better, I would certainly buy one that I can hold.