What is a book?

A book is an escape from reality; in whatever form you wish that to be.  Life throws you a lot of rough patches and curve balls, and a lot of times the only way to escape from them is to momentarily get away into another land or someone else’s life. Many of times, the stories in books can help relate to your own life and can help you when you go through similar trials. It could also be the exact opposite, a far distant land where the water will kill you and the only food to eat are edible bricks, these places in books help people to forget about their current struggles and just fade away into the stories of the characters.

I think the essence of a physical book in your hands is way better than any Kindle or Nook. It shares a story of its past, and who has read it before you or if you are the first of many. Books offer margins for note taking or commentary, and just in general the physical aspect of a book is so much more satisfying. In Tom Piazza’s interview he says “If everything’s the same size, there’s no perspective.  Perspective, as in, you know, painting. Everything becomes two-dimensional, flat.” I completely agree with this statement in the fact of making books two-dimensional, they have no depth, smell, or meaning to them other than the message the author is trying to put across. With a two-dimensional book the same meaning gets put forward but I think that having an actual book itself is much more important. To me walking into a giant library filled with books is so incredibly overwhelming and exciting. To be able to search through all the different types of books and read their history by just examining the pages, is so much more invigorating than just one Kindle filled with hundreds of stories.