My ever lasting love for books...

As they say, "books were my first love". At the risk of being accused of using a cliche, I say the same. Well, honestly, not that I have many "love"s in my life where the chronological order becomes significant, but the fact remains that I have always been, and will be, fascinated by the world of books.

When I was kid (of age around 10-12 years), I still remember the great enthusiasm I felt while entering the annual Book fair that took place in the district stadium. It was like opening up the doors to the vast knowledge world (had I known at that time that soon there will be something called Internet and Google :-). Funny enough, I always envied the sales guys of big book stores. What baffled me the most was, why they never took advantage of their "privileged" position and read all the books before selling them! (As a geek, it is not comprehensible to me how knowledge and learning may not be a temptation to every living soul in the universe.)

I consider the event of my touching the first computer of my life to be one of the biggest defining moments. The second would be the day when I discovered the Internet. The concept of having the whole knowledge base of the world at your finger tip is , well, mind blowing! Today I remember the days, when knowing the distance the distance between the earth and the moon was such a big deal and was a such a token of genius! The quiz books simply sold like hot cakes. I wonder what happened to publishers after the Internet took over.


Now what was the topic, well yes, books. But even now, when I have dozens of firefox tabs open in front of me, I still have 2/3 books in front of me with book marks at various stages. So the point is, even the great Internet has not made me forget about my beloved books. How can it! To the contrary, I use the internet to get me books (eg. order online, download pdfs etc). In fact, why should one thing of the Internet and books as competing media? Isn't the Internet the great open book of the universe?