World Book Day: Why gadgets can never replace books?

New Delhi, Apr 23: Today is World Book Day, a day dedicated to honour the role that the books play in our lives. Books are said to be man's best friend and the habit of reading is one of the best habits that an individual can cultivate.

What books give us is beyond knowledge, the indisputable truth is that the world would not be the same without books. In this age of internet and gadgets, one may say that why books when the information is available online. But, holding a book, reading it while turning pages is feeling that reading on a screen can never emulate. People like collecting books, have their own personal libraries and are proud about it.

These days we can have thousands of books in our phones. An e-book hardly takes any space and thousands can be stored in a smartphone or a gadget for reading. But would that digital collection give same satisfaction as actually owning a real book?

Books have been here for centuries and without them today's knowledge of our past ancestors, cultures and civilizations would have been impossible.

World Book Day was created on April 23rd, 1995, by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The connection between that date and books, however, was made in Spain in 1923, as it is the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, prominent Spanish Chronicler.

World Book Day is the biggest celebration of its kind. The aim of it is to celebrate authors, books, illustrators and - of course - reading

According to the website theschooloflife.com, around 130 million books have been published in the history of humanity; a heavy reader will at best get through 6,000 in a lifetime. Most of them won't be much fun or very memorable. Books are like people; we meet many but fall in love very seldom. Perhaps only thirty books will ever truly mark us. They will be different for each of us, but the way in which they affect us will be similar.