In an age of social media, internet memes, gifs, tweets, wikipedia and even AI why do I still read books, especially hard copy ones? I will tell you why.
Flicking through the pages
As you may notice I’ve been borrowing books from Hong Kong’s various public libraries and been buying second hand books on my recent UK visit. I also have the Amazon Kindle app on my smart devices, although I hardly use it. It’s hard copy books that I like, even though they caused the death of trees. First, no power is needed, then, reading text on paper does less damage to one’s eyes. There’s also the sense of achievement in finishing a book of several hundred pages. To mitigate the ecological damage, I’ve been either borrowing them from the library or buying second hand. I find reading a book is extremely relaxing whilst I’m waiting for something or queuing, that’s why I regularly have a book in bag. I find that the Kindle is only useful involving books about programming languages where I can copy and paste the code. Therefore I’ve gone back to hardcopy books.
Afterwards
What do I do with them after finishing the bought ones? I tried donating them to Hong Kong public libraries but it no longer accepts new donations of English language books. So I’m trying to sell them on Carousell.
Call me a luddite but hard copy books will remain with us for a long time.
No comments:
Post a Comment