"Books. Not the endless scrolls of text and images, moving and static, not full-immersion narratives he understood other people to experience, in what he called, in his obsolete tongue, the networks, and others called, simply, the Conversation. Not those, to wich he, anyway, had no access. Nor were they books as decorations, physical objects hand crafted by artisans, vellum-bound, gold-tooled, typeset by hand and sold at a premium.
No.
He looked at the things in the box, these fragile, worn, faded, thin, cheap paper-bound books. They smelled of dust, and mould, and age. They smelled, faintly, of pee, and tobacco, and spilled coffee. They smelled like things wich had lived.
They smelled like history."
Lavie Tidhar, The Book Seller. Interzone #244.
