What is a book?

A book is an amalgam of words that form sentences and therefore full ideas and concepts that interact together to create a logical flow of narrative intended to be read by someone other that just the writer. What a book is not is a physical thing, words themselves and the media to read a book are in fact terrestrial but the book itself and the story those words form are something almost extradimenional. The way books came into being was like the birth of other arts, it was established loosely with a common theme. That every book were words printed on paper and sold in large sets of pages bound together. But just like the other artful media we have created the book has slowly began to adapt and to leave it's previous restrictions, the binding of pages was merely a means to an end and is now just a suggestion of how to convey the books story. If we look at the music industry, a media form that actually evolved in tandem with the book for the longest time giving a new form for verse to take, where as most all prose remained between it's bindings, verse became music, and music occupies so many forms and has evolved to strive as apposed to survive. The vinyl record made music you couldn't make yourself portable, then the 8-Track tape and the CD improved on those ideas and made music such a beautiful success, likewise when we discovered a way to change prose into a new art form. That of movies and plays and television, they all started as a book renamed a script and as time passed we stopped having to use colossal reels of film to play movies, they turned into video-tapes and then DVDs and now Blu-rays and digital distribution just as it's cousin music did. But the book, the old forefather of all our art media is still trapped by the old-world construct it began as, the book is now dying because humans have attached too much to the physicality of the book's bindings, an author who relies on the concept of a book having weight, of smelling a certain way to convey the idea that yes you are in fact reading a book, have failed at their jobs. Writing itself has evolved to fit the new media the book is trying to occupy, authors are writing more descriptively and with  more passion because they have in a way transcended the mortal plane, they have become like their great-grandchildren arts by becoming digital.  The sad interaction of some authors to stop this transcendence into the next phase of life for the book are the noose around it's metaphorical neck, most all authors that make the comment that the physical body of their book is an aspect vital to it's feeling were born before the age of the Internet and digital media. They didn't grow up with a world that is always shifting in the field of arts, where nothing is set in stone anymore and where they would actually have more freedom. They too, like the book grew up bound by an old-world construct. The idea that a book must be pages between bindings and that it must go through a publishing house and the concept of royalties and not being paid the majority for their work, has crippled the minds of yesteryear's authors, and their mindsets are passing down the shackles as they die out. Digital Media is the key to the lock on the book's prison, but so many are too enticed by the nostalgia too let go. That is something that needs to change for the book to not just survive but thrive in the new-world, children need to be brought up learning too read and enjoy a book for it's content not its medium, less the book itself will rot away with the paper-backing it was forged into.

Why do I read?

Why do I read? I read for, more or less the same reasons we as a race of Humans read. Out of boredom to be entertained by the realm of the past or a flight of fantasy. Or to at times learn of the way things once were, to understand the past and it's countless flaws and apply them to solve the errs of today or even tomorrow. Because I too am a writer and not just a reader when I read it may not be to entertain or to learn in traditional ways but to leech from others who have coated pages in ink, it isn't the nicest of terms but it's the most truthful one. To learn from reading is to merely absorb the information and swallow it without any real-world application, we learn from reading textbooks and news articles things we are often mandated to read. But what we leech, what we truly feast and gorge our minds on are books and articles of art that fill us with new ideas and concepts our minds alone could never have explored without this outside intervention, and to say we do not use the works of other to our advantage when we write in our own words is a heinous fallacy. As a race we consume and grow in all we do as is the way of humanity, and so to is it true in writing and reading. To pluck the best words and thoughts, the most interesting concepts and details from the works of others to attempt to amalgamate a story of worth is the busy work of all writers and is what an avid reader will expect of an piece they're reading. Why do I read? I read to become a better writer, a more knowledgeable person, and to expand my mind to where it could never have possibly gone alone.