Flametoad

I need to learn to not be such a format snob.

The irony is not lost on me. Among many other things, I publish e-books and I’m a big proponent of the same. So why did I just drop more than $50 on two books (and a toy for my tadpole)? Why? For one reason, I want to support my favorite authors. I’m a fan of Michael Stackpole and E.E. Knight and I want them to be able to afford to write as a full time career, so I picked up The New World and Valentine’s Resolve. For another, it looks like I paid cover price at my local B&N when I could have saved quite a bit of money ordering online. That’s the premium I paid for wanting them RIGHT NOW. But the main reason I’m getting at is even more elementary. I like big books. I like the feel of a good hardback or even good trade paperback in my hands and given the choice between a cheaper paperback or a more expensive hardback, I’ll drop my money on the hardback. Crazy, huh? The words are the same. Only the presentation differs.

So how can I write about the coming e-book revolution with a straight face? What will become of my beautiful (to me, at least) library of hundreds of books? I wonder the same thing. I recently wrote about retrieving Captain from Castille (in hardback) from my grandparents’ estate. They often said that it was their favorite book and encouraged me to find a copy, but it wasn’t until their deaths that I did so and even then it was the one from their own home. Yet when I turned the cover and started reading those yellowed pages, I felt a special connection with my grandparents. I could imagine younger versions of themselves–people who at the time were my own age–reading the same words and feeling the same thrills at the story’s pulp action and romance.

One of the reasons I keep my books instead of selling them back to a bookstore is that I like the idea of passing them on to my two tadpoles. One of the great truths in life is that we give to others what we ourselves want or wish we’d had. In my case, as a kid I couldn’t get enough books. I tore like a buzz-saw through the books in our house and our library. Now that I’m the parent, I hope I can instill in the tadpoles my love for reading and give them their own library (granted, one of narrow scope) at their disposal. If they feel a bond with their pappa toad, that’ll be icing on the cake.

Consequently, I still look forward to the day when I can hold an e-book reader with hundreds of my favorite books loaded on its memory card. Who knows? Maybe one day my legacy to the kids will be to pass along that beat-up piece of hardware and a handful of antiquated memory cards with hundreds of my favorite books. However, I’m still a format snob. I’ll wait to get started until the screen is the size of a hardback.