I love to read and reading is important to me, but I never felt "romantically" about #books themselves. I'm no Rory Gilmore. I won't spent hours in a library or a bookstore, I am not delighted by the smell of printed books , for me it was always the reading - not the books. So yeah, I'm an ebooks kind of girl, especially since I am hopping between two homes every week.
@Virelai OH MY GOD SAME! I tried to be that person and accumulated so many books but paper books are just so inconvenient and now I have them and never read them because the Kindle is just more comfortable.
@quatschmitsauce high five for the unromantic-about-books-readers! :D
@quatschmitsauce @Virelai same here ... would be really great to have some system where you could trade in your paper books for ebooks, I own many good books which I would maybe re- read but don't, because paper is too inconvenient but I'm too cheap to re- buy the ebook edition of a book I already own
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@Virelai ah interesting! :) I'm definitely on the romantic side, and it didn't come to my mind until now, that it could be two separate things.
@knittingsquirrel I have the feeling that most people who love to read are also romantic about books themselves, I feel a bit outside of the club there, hehe ;)
@Virelai yeah, i understand that!
@Virelai I do romanticise physical books myself. Even have wanted to learn about bookbinding, which is its own little crafting community.
@JordiGH @Virelai I want to learn about bookbinding and at the same time I decided to buy as little physical books as possible. Poor trees getting cut down and processed, and all the dead weight when moving, and all the space it requires, and all the inflexibility physical books bring. So now I wonder: bookbinding my own notebooks, perhaps... ? Noooo!
@kensanata @JordiGH haha, I feel you! It's surely a nice hobby though! Dead weight resonates with me too, I don't usually read books twice and all that space for physical objects that I don't need anymore... Not a fan!
@JordiGH and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that ;) I had a little book binding project at school once, it was fun!
@JordiGH @Virelai There are some truly gorgeous books out there, for sure. Myself, I've kind of got a foot in both camps.
When I was young and e-ink wasn't a thing, I used to have a biiiiiiig shelf full of mass market paper backs (often with packing tape for spines after rattling around in a backpack too long) and a smaller one of much handsomer books I wanted as a collector piece.
Now I'm moving toward having just a kindle and the smaller shelf.
@Virelai same! I initially had qualms about not being able to show off my collection to visitors, but when I realized how much easier ebooks are on my hands I never looked back. And I don't have hand problems.
I still love browsing bookstores & libraries, but that's more about the serendipity and discovery. Recommendation algorithms are nice but I don't think the browsing experience has really caught up yet.
@mcmoots I understand that ;) I had similar thoughts but then wondered why it was so important to me to have my books for "show off" especially since its mostly dead space to me as I rarely reread.
I'm on Goodreads and I like to browse there, I found many great books there. I do enjoy bookstores and usually discover something too, just not often or long ;)
@Virelai
I like to have some of my favorite books in paper form but they don't even have to be hardcover. It's more to show "I like this" apart from that ebooks all the way
@Virelai
Also I now buyb the prints of webcomics I read. Time will tell how long that works out 🙈
There are a lot of characters in books or tv shows that romanticize books, I can never quite relate :(