Dear Amazon Kindle, I hate you.

Okay. Let me preface this by saying that the Kindle is not a bad product. In fact, it is a good product. One that many people enjoy.

But, obviously, I do not. And I have reasons. And while many of these reasons are slightly crazy and have a lot to do with my personal preferences, they are important to me.

Reasons why I prefer paper books to E-Readers.

1) It's hard to read. Like many Americans, I have terrible vision that I correct daily with glasses or contacts. Reading text on a computer screen after just a few hours gives me a headache that I can only fix with a piece of red velvet cake. Also, I hate have to scroll down or across to get to every page. I know it sounds stupid, but it really bothers me that I just can't look over to the next page without having to scroll. The backlighting on the screen also can sometimes be deceptive to the eye and normally causes me to fiddle with the lighting until I finally can see. Very annoying.

2) I love cracking paper book's spines. I know it doesn't sound like much, but I love knowing and physically feeling that I am the first person to open this book. It's like christmas morning. You know that nobody else has played with your new toy. It's all yours. Hearing the spine crack instantly makes me ready to get into this new book. With a kindle, I get no satisfying spine cracking sound. The E-Reader doesn't give me the very important sound effects, and I resent it for that.

3) Beat up books are the best. I also get extreme satisfaction out of loving a book so much, I literally rip it apart over time. There is something about seeing my old, tattered copy of The Giver that just makes me so happy. I can't part with it. I'll have that old copy of the book until the day I die. Or I lose it. Which, for me, is always a possibility. You can't beat up the kindle. It has to stay in good condition or the thing doesn't work. I can't throw it across the room when I get fed up with a character, and it doesn't react very well when I accidentally spill water and/or goldfish on it. I always have to be careful with the E-Reader. I have to watch where I put it, because someone would steal it. Nobody would steal my torn paperback copy of The Giver.

4) Kindles, Ipads, Nooks, they all cost way too much money. I just find it extremely annoying to have to buy a 100, 200 or 5oo dollar E-Reader, and then still have to spend almost the exact same amount of money for a digital copy of the book as I would have spent for a paperback version. I would rather have book shelves filled with paperback and hardback books that I bought at a store, than a digital library I had to buy online. I want to look at the book covers closely. I don't want to spend extra money on an E-Reader.

I know that a lot of people disagree with me. And I love most of the new technological advances that we've made in the past 5 years. But for sentimental reasons, I can't let paperback books go, and I resent that the E-Reader market is trying to make me.