Dog Ears

I’m EJ and I dog ear book pages.

Yeah, I know, sacrilege, defamation of the sacred page, the kind of thing the library police are there for. Still, I do it and I’m glad other readers do it as well. I love it when I’m ferreting out clues in a good mystery, following the adventures of a pirate cursed by the dust of a hundred dogs, viewing the Mississippi from Pap’s point of view or slicing up a Fokker fuselage with my Sopwith’s 7.7s and I suddenly run across a dog eared page. I always stop and think: Someone has been here before me, in this very place I now am.

I always wonder about the person who dog eared the page; were they young or old, male or female? Did they run out of time, patience, were they distracted by something, called to the phone or by a loved one or just get sleepy at the end of a long day? Were they casual readers, avid readers or total book junkies as I am? What did they think of this story we share? Have they read other books by the same author or was this their first? When I see that crease up there I actually feel the presence of that unknown reader, I can almost see them standing there, smiling, knowing what’s ahead, squirming to keep from giving the end away.

The publishing industry is going through changes, eBooks are taking over. I’ll admit that despite my love for the feel of a book in my hands, I support this eBook revolution. I think it will give a lot of good writers a chance to entertain a lot of good readers, something the publishing industry with its bottom-line mentality doesn’t seem to get. The sad thing about that, though, is you can’t dog ear 1s and 0s.