Ink, glue and paper

Today has been a rare and enjoyable day off, so I had a little more leisure this morning to sit in my armchair with my usual cup of black tea and play around with this. I am by no means a design freak but I found it oddly mesmerising. The entry about the Amazon Kindle (...yes, apparently it is featured in the Design Museum...) talks about the way books have finally started to follow music and make the transition from from analogue to digital. Every so often you do hear store news stories about sales of ebooks overtaking 'treebooks', and certainly on the train into work in the mornings I almost always see at least two people reading Kindles (other ereaders are available!).
I started reading ebooks a couple of years ago and although they initially seemed strange - not like 'real' books - it is amazing how quickly you your brain adjusts. Now I read them all the time. One thing you really start to appreciate after a while is the sharp drop in clutter. If you buy a physical book, your'e left with a chunk of ink, glue and paper, which eventually has to sit on a shelf somewhere, gathering dust and getting in the way. Ebooks, by contrast, take up almost no space at all. They're just bits and bytes, zero and ones squirreled away in a memory chip somewhere.
Of course physical books and ebooks are not mutually exclusive. I still love and buy physical books. There is nothing quite like the atmosphere you get when you are surrounded by thousands of them. I used to love hanging around in Borders in York for precisely that reason, and I still feel a pang when I pass the now empty shop front there these days.
I was in Knaresborough earlier today. It's a nice wee town, very close to where I live, full of small, boutique-y knick-knack shops. It also comes complete with an air of history, its own ruined castle, rather eye-catching river gorge scenery and sweeping railway bridges. This shot shows an old-fashioned bookshop near the town centre. Anyone who remembers this blip will not be surprised to hear that I went in and bought the book in the lower right. Very geeky I know - but I'm a hopeless case when it comes to almost all things Game of Thrones.
This was a very nearly today's blip - if only it had been in focus!