“I like to own my own books because I can read them many times.”
Kulisara
Age 7
(from the website)

My daughter’s house isn’t, although she’s several degrees beyond me. Her kids read early but in a skimpy environment. I’ll just have to load them down with books, real books, the kind we can fondle and smell and tAste. To travel with a library, an e-book reader is just right. But when laying about, there’s nothing like a real book.

I also was lucky enough to live across the street from my parents’ college and have access to the children’s reading room, set up for teachers in training, and filled with books for all ages. My friend Debra and I spent one summer, when we were 9 or 10, riding our bikes to that library every day and reading right there in that room—no need to check anything out! We had a good public library in town and we used it too, but the college library was right there and the reading room was a little hideaway we had all to ourselves.

When I try to imagine a world without physical books, where everything is digital and electronic, I always wonder how our kids would be exposed to the stories? Would they choose to pick up an e-reader and scroll up and down on a tiny screen, or will they just default to the video game and television set sitting right in front of them? How would they be aware that the books exist? That’s one of many reasons I think the physical book will never go away, although e-books are fine for some purposes.

Wal-Mart is said to have a display system called “Actionality” where likely impulse purchases are put right out in front of the consumers in order to attract their attention and sell more items, whether they were intending to get those things or not. Books need to be out in front of our children, where they can see them, pick them up, and flip through them. Else they will probably never know that a lot of these books ever existed.