Leafing Through the Pages

© Victoria Evangelina Belyavskaya

25.04.2008

I wish I had been in Spain on April 23. Since the medieval era there
has been a tradition for men to give roses to their lovers and since
1925 for the woman to give a book in exchange. But I was in Tbilisi,
surfing the web and learning how to transfer my newly-purchased e-
books into i-pod notes, and stumbled upon an advertising of
celebration of the World Book Day, April 23, in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia. “Oh, nooo!” I moaned. “They are going to have such
amazing book deals!”

“You travel for bookstores, don’t you,” told me a friend who was
typing away next to me.

It’s been a long time since I admitted having no resistance to the

worlds of bookstores and surrendered into their reign over me. Tiny
second hands and mega big, they are my escape from the world. How many times have my loved
ones got SMS such as “Guess where I am?” from all over the world, and it did not take them too
long to shoot back “Bkstore, for sure. What are you leafing through now?”

One of the first places I discover in a new city is a bookstore. And then I build my itinerary,
knowing that in times of feeling sad and fed up with sightseeing, needing to escape but still to
not be alone, I have a place to go to. Since I was a kid, I have tended to hide in the rows of books
telling me about other people’s lives and the incredible richness of the ways life can unfold.
Mom knew it was OK to pick me up from school two-three hours later, when I would feel my
book reservoirs with the smells, murmur of pages and views of rows of the silent book-soldiers
in a library, which was my temple of peace and desired loneliness.

Having a book always brought me great reassurance, as if the knowledge has already been
acquired, and useful advice put into practice. With the demand to read too many study books, I
have never read much of classics, fiction and new titles, but I would store them up in my place,
and then struggle to carry them from one country to another. Never feel sorry for spending
money on a book, wrote Robin Sharma in “The Greatness Guide,” you are building your library.

World Book Day started as a humble tradition in Catalonia, Spain, on April 23, 1923 – the birth
or death anniversary of literary giants like William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Inca
Garcilaso de la Vega, Josep Pla, Maurice Druon, Manuel Mejнa Vallejo, Halldуr Laxness and
Vladimir Nabokov. “Half the yearly sales of books in Catalonia are at this time with over
400,000 sold and exchanged for over 4 million roses,” says a Wikipedia entry on the event.

In 1995, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
declared April 23 World Book Day and, since then, people all over the world have joined the
Catalonians in celebrating books, publishing, and copyright.
E-book, the baby sibling of a traditional book, slowly starts its baby-steps across the world wide
web with publishers keen to embrace the new revenue for promotion and profit. There have been
plenty of disputes on the question of impossibility of switching from a traditional book to an e-
book on many levels, including the technical challenges to make reading from the screen an easy
and pleasant experience, to the emotional attachment to holding a book, and leafing through the
pages. Yet the concept of a digital book, which failed in the late eighties and early nineties, is
coming in bloom now. While Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s e-reader are still quite dear ($399 and
$299, respectively) many have purchased them, realizing the many quality advantages; others,
like me, are patient enough to wait for the price drop while reading e-books from the screens of
laptops, smart phones, i-pods and other e-book reader devices.

There are plenty of free e-book libraries all over the Internet. Enhancing standards of copyright
control on internet leave books with expired copyrights for free downloads, while if you want to
read a newer book, you need to pay for it. In comparison with a hard copy edition, it will still
cost less. www.ebooks.com has a growing selection of current and past bestsellers in fiction,
business and self help. www.audible.com offers selection of yearly subscription plans with good
discounts for the many titles offered by Audible.

It may seem inexpensive to produce an e-book, but it still has many of the costs associated with
print publishing: advances, editorial, sales, marketing, promotion and publicity. In addition, there
are a host of new costs, including converting files to multiple formats, digital warehousing, anti-
piracy protection, and content and metadata tracking, writes theBookseller.com

“In 2007, wholesale e-book sales hit $31.7m (Ј16m) according to the International Digital
Publishing Forum (IDPF), which collects data from trade publishers on behalf of the Association
of American Publishers. The figure represents less than 1% of an approximately $35bn (Ј17.6bn)
US book market. Retail numbers are hazy, but IDPF suggests that it would be about double the
wholesale number. The data does not include library, educational or professional electronic
sales,” informs “A right royal battle” article published by theBookseller.com

When was the last time you could not wait till you can get back to a book? I sadly watch how my
friends are rushing to secure their careers, maintain their homes and bodies, with days slipping
through their fingers, leaving the soul sleeping. Many associate the “soul feeding” expression
with visiting the Church or a Temple; it is true about reading a book that touches your heart, too.
My grandma used to gather us, kids, in one room and read aloud. When we grew up, we would
take turns. Of course, life with no TV set helped us get together through reading evenings. I am
watching the kids of my friends grow up. They search YouTube, play video games and download
music when they are barely three years old. They do learn to read at an early age. But what
books are under their blankets and is there a flash light under their pillows to escape in the
fantasy world when Mom walks into the bedroom, and third time in a row orders to switch off
the lights and go to sleep?

The written word has a power that transcends ink on paper. Laughter and tears are hidden in
between the covers of a book, be it a hardcopy, an e-copy or its audible version. Years of lonely
labor of the writer come to you, and once you have the book that answers the search of your
heart, you will have the time to read it and find all the magic of the world in its message.