This One for the Books

There is no smell

The sense of smell is often the most neglected of the senses. You cannot let your nose dive into the pages of an ebook and recognize how new it is based on the fragrant crispness of the paper. You cannot smell how cherished it is by the hands that held it for hours, nor trace the lingering hint of a flowery soap, coffee, or cigarette smoke. The physical books develop their own character by being tucked between the shelves, maturing with a distinct moldy smell. 

Virtual bookstores are a bore

No matter how hard the think tanks, marketing miracle workers and spin doctors think it, there is no virtual equivalent of stepping inside a bookstore, visiting a library or seeing someone's collection in their homes. There are millions of books available online. But it's not about quantity. It's about the resulting circumstances that lead you to books by way of the bookstores. That's a story in itself. Someone bought a Kurt Vonnegut from a second-hand bookshop in Kuala Lumpur. He gave his extra copy of Salinger's Nine Stories. He gave his Nietzsche volume which he bought from his student-job salary, the same edition returning to him by way of his future wife. Compared to what the reviews of online bookstore recommend, there's also a healthy randomness in chancing upon whatever is in the bookstore or what your friends recommend. Your next read sparked from real conversations. It's a smaller, more familiar sphere of influence that's less inhibited by advertising analytics. 

Save a few Pennies

I compared prices on some of my most recent reads.

A Visit from the Goon Squad costs PHP465.90 online when I got a decent paperback for PHP300 excluding the 20% discount. Kobo also sells the locally-published Manila Noir for PHP465.90 and I got mine for PHP299 excluding the 5% discount.

Jumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies would sell PHP463.68 online when you can get it for PHP145 at BookSale. Italo Calvino's Marcovaldo is discounted online at PHP379.69 but I got mine for PHP125 at BookSale.

On top of that, you have to buy an ebook reader. A decent one is around PHP6,000. And you'll have to pay for shipping costs and customs taxes if you buy directly from Amazon.

Reliability, Sentimentality and the Long Run

At the turn of the century, I've downloaded several ebooks and kept the files. They're now stored in an obsolete and already dysfunctional 20GB iPod color. I saved copies of the files, of course, which are now in unrecoverable, fried hard discs. Those turn-of-the-century ebooks are all burned, dead cells now.

On the other hand, the J.D. Salingers and Irvine Welshes, Douglas Couplands and F. Sionil Jose's books are standing the test of time and has moved from one hand to another, one shelf to another after having been taken to restaurants, the beach, parking lots, airports or wherever else. They contain very same words that glued my gaze. A lot has changed now, along with the ideas I concentrate on, but upon seeing these things and re-reading the words, I attribute to them - who I am now.

A few days ago, the news feed on my social media app told me that the last telegram in the country was sent.

Time is such a goon. To everything.

But it gets even more interesting. The last couple of months a major ebook brand partnered with the country's biggest Bookstore chain and I concede that it caught my fancy. It's affordable, it's convenient, and the technology is slick. The printed books, I feel, are also coming to their end. I thought I should accept that, move forward and adapt. So I tried to justify with a rather unbridled enthusiasm that I saw in what I wrote now.

What truly convinced me to stay with my books was just holding it, looking at the cover, or any other reason that's more profoundly sentimental than it is practical.

I'm an old man who sticks to his old chair, thinking Lazy Boys and massage chairs just can't hit the spot.