Books

I am regularly ribbed by friends and family about my adoption of ebooks. "What about real books?", they cry. Well, a book is still a book, whether it exists as bits and bytes or is laid out on printed paper. Then they express surprise that I still have any printed books, as though print and electronic media were somehow mutually exclusive, and buying a Kindle means throwing out your entire collection of 'treebooks'. Sheer daftness of course. Printed books can be splendid, tactile objects, and these, arrayed along the shelves of the local library, are particularly fine-looking specimens.