E-readers are the future? *spit*

I have always been a big reader. Days could go by where I would not lift my head from a new book for anything other than tea breaks and meals. I prefer reading to any other activity I can do in my house. It trumps watching TV, it trumps playing the Xbox and it blows cleaning right out of the water.

I can spend hours in Waterstones, browsing the Horror, flicking through the Science Fiction, scoffing at the Dark Romance (Twilight wannabes, each and every one of them) and thumb through the Classics.

But now the livelihood of of all book stores has been threatened by the creation of... The E-READER's *spit*.

Now first of all I should say that I can actually see all the advantages to e-readers like the most popular Amazon Kindle. They're great for travelling. You're entire library in the palm of your hand at all times, it can hold around 50,000 books which is more than most people will ever own. It is perfect for people who have never been big readers before the invention of them and if they can't be persuaded to purchase and house all these physical books, I would urge them to buy an e-reader. In reality, the sale of e-books outweighs that of the sales of tangible books. 2 e-books are sold for every physical copy. Clearly the world sees e-readers as the future.

But now I've got the diplomatic crap out of the way, let me tell you what I really think.

E-readers are the stain of the literary world! They take away from the entire experience. You can't bury your head in a tablet computer e-book. You can't make a real decision on whether or not to buy a book. When I'm browsing I like to see the thickness, the size of the words, the space between the sentences judging how long it would take me to read it and whether it would be worth my time buying it and generally being the world's biggest nerd . Online you can't do this. All you get on an online book store or from and e-book retailer is the Total Page count,  the cover, a short synopsis of the book and a nice little picture of the author that nobody really cares about.

Now this may be enough for some, but not for die hard book-worms and certainly not for me! I mean you have to charge the bloody thing! Who wants to have to charge their books before they read them? Even then they only have a finite amount of time before they have to recharge them all over again, thus leading them into a deadly cycle starting with their new found addiction to reading and ending with more electricity being used, non-renewable sources of energy depleted much faster and generally the end of life on Earth as we know it.

Over the top? Well at least I didn't go into detail about how I adore the smell of books. Because even I know that would be a bit creepy and you could lose what little remainder of respect you ever had for me.