A Golden Age For Books

Despite the rumblings I have heard in the press about the coming end of books I think the assumption is all wrong. A book is not necessarily something you put on a shelf any longer, but are books dying? I don’t believe it. A book is something you read, whether it’s in hardcover, paperback, or electronic. What matters is what has always mattered; story, characters, interesting facts, history revealed, and so on.What really excites me is the number of people I see reading books. I have always seen a few people at airports and in planes reading but yesterday I noticed  a lot of people reading. In my row of five seats all five of us were reading, as were three of the five in the row ahead of us. Last week I took my children to the library and the pickings were slim; there were few books on the shelves, not because of budget cutbacks, but because the books had been loaned. Has all the talk in the press about electronic book readers generated a new buzz around reading in general? I think it is possible. It seems now to be cool to read.