As an author, I spend a lot of time around book people.
They’re my people.
I see photos of overflowing bookshelves, beautifully organised libraries, cosy reading corners, trips to independent bookshops, and endless discussions about the smell of old books. There are candles that smell like libraries. Coffee mugs declaring eternal love for bookstores. Tote bags celebrating librarians. Entire social media feeds dedicated to buying books faster than it’s humanly possible to read them.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of that.
But I’ve noticed something curious.
It sometimes feels as though we’re embarrassed to admit what we actually love.
The story.
Instead, we talk about the paper. The ink. The bindings. The ritual. The aesthetics. The shelves.
It’s almost as if saying, “I just love getting lost in a brilliant story,” isn’t quite bookish enough.
For me, the story has always been the destination. Everything else is just transport.
Which probably explains why I fell in love with the Kindle almost immediately.
A lot of people see it as a compromise. I see it as the opposite.
The Kindle strips away almost everything except the one thing I care about. It doesn’t smell. It doesn’t look beautiful on a shelf. It doesn’t become part of the décor. It doesn’t demand a special bookmark or a reading nook or a cup of artisanal tea.
It just quietly transfers one person’s imagination into another person’s brain.
It’s literary telepathy.
When I’m twenty pages into a great novel, I don’t know—or care—whether those words arrived via paper, e-ink, a scroll, or were chiselled into a stone tablet. If the author has done their job well, the medium disappears completely.
All that’s left is me, somewhere else, living someone else’s impossible life for a while.
That’s magic.
I suspect that’s also why, as an author, I don’t dream about seeing my books lined up on shelves nearly as much as I dream about someone missing their train because they couldn’t stop reading.
Or someone staying awake until two in the morning because they just had to finish one more chapter.
Or someone laughing out loud in public and getting strange looks.
Or crying.
Those moments don’t happen because of paper.
They happen because of story.
So if you love the smell of books, wonderful.
If you love libraries, wonderful.
If browsing bookshops is your happy place, wonderful.
But don’t forget the reason all those things exist in the first place.
Not because we love books.
Because we love the worlds hiding inside them.
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