"A green crochet cover envelopes the Kindle of Eileen Messina in Freeport, Maine. She has downloaded a number of popular titles onto her reading device – one of many new handheld digital gadgets now available to read books. New Yorker reporter Nicholson Baker wrote that Messina lamented that books at the library sometimes smelled of cigarette smoke. Baker says, “a Kindle book is a smoke-free environment.” But a lot of book-readers, myself included, enjoy the smell and palpable history of a book from a library or used bookstore. There is something comforting about the shared experience of reading a physical book many others have read, and will read in the future. I like the story of a used book – a folded page, the markings on the margins, the hints at its past. Sure, sometimes they smell like cigarette smoke, but they can also smell like the places they’ve been, whether it’s a dusty old used bookstore or the tropical funk of Asunción, Paraguay. You can’t share a Kindle book and so history doesn’t cling to it the same way." - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet