What Is A Book? Well, it's certainly not Liberal Democrat MP Greg Mulholland.

What is a book? When I think 'book', I think of the Russell Brand autobiography sitting in my bathroom. Why? Because I don't read very often. The last book I attempted to read was Requiem For A Dream by Hubert Selby Jr, and I failed at that. I'm currently attempting to read the Visual Quickstart Guide to Illustrator CS2 by Weinmann Lourekas, and let me tell you, I'm probably about to fail at that too.

A book.

My relationship with books isn't peachy, but that doesn't mean to say I don't think they're wonderful. I just don't have the time/money/patience/license for them. I appreciate that they are probably the most superior way to distribute information, given that they are portable, they don't run on electricity and they can contain swathes of information. Given that the internet has made information not only more accessible [you don't have to que outside a computer to get a copy of something and you don't have to wait for the internet to open] but also, and this is the dealbreaker, free - you'd think that books would plummet in popularity, but this is obviously not the case. And why is that?

Well, I think people like the idea of having something tangiable, something that's there and can be seen, can remind you of things other than the content inside. It's also a good way of recording information, to get the same effect of a computer being totally wiped and losing all your spreadsheets, you'd have to do something like burn down a library. And I'm just not willing to do that.

The digital age has even seen companies try to make electronic replicas of books, e-books for example, and Nintendo recently released a 'game' for the DS which has 100 classic books on it, and you can flick through pages on it's screen. I think that speaks volumes [excuse the terrible pun] about why people still want books, and i feel boosts my argument that people want something tangiable.

I remember sitting in my mate Hollis's house last year, looking up through drunken eyes at his bookcase and thinking "Bloody smartarse." - he had books on Chaos Theory, Nostrodamus, Nietzsche and the like. I mean it made sense, he was a philosophy student. But you wouldn't get the 'look at me, i read, therefore making your less-than-average literary intake give you feelings of mental inadequacy' effect if everything was digital, I wouldn't look through his web browser history and gawp at him musing about Pythagoras, I'd be too drunk.

A book is a record. It's set in stone, you can't delete the words from the page or have them crash on you. Though, you can burn them like the Nazis did, but I like to think you wouldn't do that.