| Reader |
October 31, 2019
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| Being retired he was very happy. But it was not because he didn't like to work. He liked to work, and he was the type of person who works hard pursuing ideal goals. So, he had been always busy and he didn't have much time to do his most favorite thing, reading. He read various types of books, detective stories, historical stories, essays, international political stories, businesses setting stories, war stories, spy stories, love stories, etc. He didn't watch TV and most of his time was devoted for reading. Now that he was retired, his routine was to go to a certain bookstore which was located 20 minutes by bike from his apartment. This bookstore had chairs around shelves here and there, so he was able to read books sitting down. Of course, if he wanted to read while sitting down and read books in a quiet environment, he could go to a library. But, he wanted to own books if they were good books. Moreover, he would sometimes use a lot of time to read one book, for example several months, reading it little by little. Sometimes though he would read through one book in a couple of days. Another reason why he went to this bookstore was because they had  secondhand books. Half of the books in this shop were used books. It was sometimes strange to see one book would sell for $1, but another book, the same book, would be $7. Of course, the first one was a used book and the second one was brand new. But sometimes the old ones were not so different from the new ones. At first, he couldn't understand this shop's strategy ~to have both new books and old books in the same shop. One day, when he was thinking about e-books, he figured it out.When amazon started its e-book system about 10 years ago, he soon bought an e-reader called Kindle and started to read e-books. For him, it was like a dream. He didn't need to go to a bookstore, just download them at home or anywhere. It was very convenient to change the size of letters on the machine, as he had "old eye sight". The machine was compact and light so he could bring it anywhere. A Kindle machine was said to be able to stock 3000 books. The books' prices were relatively cheaper than real books. The battery would only need to be charged once a month or so. The backlight was bright, so you could read in a dark place. It seemed like an ideal machine and system. He thought that in the near future, real books would disappear. Actually he used his Kindle for five years and downloaded more than 100 books. But when five years had passed, suddenly he got tired of using his Kindle and quit using it. After that, he didn't use it at all. What happened? He didn't know the exact reason. But, maybe he wanted to flip the pages of a book. Flipping pages was his liking as a long time reader. He sometimes took time to read one book, for a month. He might have wanted his unfinished books around him ready for reading. He liked to look at his book shelves with the memory of his reading experience. E-books were not good at this type of thing. Recently, he came up with a more typical and simple difference between e-books and real books. In the "e-book world" there is no chance to get secondhand books. They can't sell used e-books. There is no notion that an e-book is new or old. It was a very simple idea, but for him it seemed like a very important thing. In the real book world, we can easily access old things, you can sell your books on the market. Used books were rather cheaper than e-books. You can't sell your e-books even if you think that you don't need them anymore. Now, he loved the "1 Dollar Book Corner" which had a huge selection at the bookstore. In this corner, there were a lot of best seller books that he hadn't read. There were a lot of books that took many awards. There were a lot of his favorite authors' books. There were a lot of books from authors that he had never read yet. He was very happy thinking that he was able to choose one book from those books, taking his time. |
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*pursue :追い求める
*setting :設定
*devote :打ち込む、捧げる
*Now that :今〜したので
*brand new :真新しい
*strategy :戦略
*figure out :わかる
*get tired :疲れる