Books on the bedside table…
Hmmm, this is going to be just a ramble….I have often wondered what are the piles of books/reading material that one keeps by on one’s bedside table (or even in the bathroom for that matter!). Isnt reading a very personal matter? Surely it is not to be dictated by fashions? There are times, when I feel quite stunned by the media blitzkrieg about books. As a publisher I can understand the desire to promote books and ensure that every little space that is made available for books is to be utilised, but surely, the readers too should have their say. And somewhere, somewhere there should be a meeting ground/platform where publishers, retailers, readers/customers etc can decide what to sell/browse/buy. (And an internet portal is not necessarily the answer to this… the pleasure of browsing and smelling through a fresh clean book is just indescribable!) Its a 24×7 quandry about what is discussed in the papers is usually not as easily available everywhere, whereas what the reader wants, especially if it is a slightly “older” book is virtually impossible to simpy buy off the shelf…unless of course it has been upgraded to “classical” reading. 
So, bringing us back to the question of what we have by our bedside tables… isnt it usually a motley collection of the latest title to be read to what we like to re-read and revel in and sometimes sneak in one or two of the fabulous children’s stuff that we remember?
Comments anyone?!
Tags: Editing, English - Other
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
“the pleasure of browsing and smelling through a fresh clean book is just indescribable!”
I think someone here is a bibliophile. ;) And for the record, I concur. This is why sites like amazon are trying to recreate this by allowing you to browse inside books, but it’s never going to be the same.
In the same vein, I’m all for the ecological and logistical impact and convenience of digital books, esp now that e-ink and the like are ready to become widely available, but I’ll miss the physical presence of books. Having the entire Gutenberg Project’s output in a single book of one page (totally conceivable with the advent of e-ink) wins outright however.
Google Books is pretty handy for browsing books – limited pages.
The pleasure of browsing and smelling through an old torn second hand book with the name of an unknown person written on its first page, is just indescribable.