The Love of a good nook

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a nook.” Or something like that.

I finally took the plunge and bought a nook. For those of you who think a nook is a pacifier—it sort of is, but not for infants. Actually, it’s an ebook reader from Barnes & Noble. As a writer, I held off, thinking that I would injure my own chances of future publication by purchasing the devil’s device—like Eve taking the pretty apple and suddenly finding herself outside the garden in the dead of winter, barefoot and pregnant, with nothing but a hairy husband and a snakeskin robe.

You see, I dream of someday holding a real hardback book in my hands, my words and thoughts on paper made from actual trees that gave their lives just to see my plotline play out in a four-hundred page masterpiece. Obviously, a nook cannot give me the same rush, even if my book was downloaded by millions of people. (Okay, maybe it would be really cool, but without the sacrificial death of trees, what does it really mean?)

On one hand I feel like a traitor to the print market—on the other hand I feel like a kid with a new toy. A toy that can hold up to fifteen hundred books. Yes! You heard me right. Fifteen hundred books. An awesome amount of fun in a little hand-held device. (I’m not even going to compare it to the GameBoy that my kids were so infatuated with at one time. That would be sacribooklegious.)

Thirteen hundred and twenty five books sit on the shelves of my “literal hardcopy library,” not counting the boxes of old paperbacks and children’s books in the attic. It’s taken me almost thirty years to collect this many. So, it may take a little while to read 1500 more on my nook. But I’m willing to try.

Some of you may think I’ve gone to the dark side. But you couldn’t be more wrong. When the screams of thousands of stories pierced my soul, begging to be released from the Barnes & Noble ebook store, I could do nothing less than purchase my own nook and set a few voices free. In fact, I immediately downloaded the complete KJV for only 99¢ just to even things out. After all, the Bible does have 66 books.

The other reason I finally gave in to the mass nook advertisement emails from Barnes & Noble was the thought of physically moving all of my hardbacks from the bookcases in my office next week. New carpet will be installed upstairs and I have to empty the room. That’s a lot of books to lug downstairs and then back up again. Sure it gives me an opportunity to do my yearly dust jacket dusting, but it also gives me muscle spasms and allows my chiropractor to make an easy forty bucks. Forty bucks I could have spent on ebooks that don’t weigh anything at all.

I’ll probably still be tempted to buy certain novels in hardback from time to time, but maybe the nook will pacify me enough to slow the flow. It is getting rather dangerous in here with books stacked in crooked piles on top of my bookcases. I feel like I’m walking in Sam’s Club with pallets of canned beans hanging over my head, praying the earth doesn’t shift and send an avalanche down upon me. My tombstone would read: “Who said Words can’t hurt ya?”

Follow