On Memorial Day, I remember when hard cover books ruled the publishing world, I  wrote more than 25 of those books, and am finishing yet another, probably, and by my own choice, my last.

I have an old bookcase, a former rescued and renovated chicken coop, in my study, I love to look at it when the sunlight flashes across in the afternoon.

This morning, at a flower and plant sale, a woman came up to me to lament what the thought of as the “tragic end of books” in the way she knew them. How sad, she said, that children would read on screens and tablets, not hold paper in their hands. Reading, she said gloomily, is dying.

She assumed I would be sympathetic to this gloomy and narcissistic whine. She was wrong.

She said she will never read anything that is not a paper book, and laments the future of  poor children today.

I do not share her views about books. Or children. Or reading.

The universe does not care if stories are told on papyrus or parchment or paper, and neither to children entering the world today. Just because it was what  we did does not make it sacred and superior.

Just because it is done on a tablet or screen does not make it morally superior. Just because we are used to it does not make it better.

The children I know read much more than I ever did, they do it easily, in graphic color on portable  devices, and for pennies. This may not be good for my long vanished royalty checks, but that is my problem, not the problem of kids today.

Survey after survey finds that paper books will still be around, that small and good bookstores will survive, and that there is no evidence that children are one bit dumber than we are.  The kids I know are a lot smarter than I was, or am. The surveys also show that more people are reading more book and poems and stories in more different forms and less expensively than ever before.

And how can anyone who loves stories not bow to that?

Publishing careers like mine are fading away, it is getting harder all the time to sell a book and earn any money. The new writers are doing it differently. So am I.

So I tell my stories on my blog, and my world has not come to an end, it has, in fact, grown richer and more creative. And the truth is, I like it better.

I do honor books and love to hold them and touch them and look at them every day. They were the dream of my life, and gave me the opportunity to love my work every day that I did it. They are fading into the background of our culture, and I am happier and more productive than I have ever been.

What is the message in that for me, and for anyone else? I think is that change is not the exception, it is the rule, Change, like death, will come to all of us, and the test of a good life for me is not that it is perfect or static, rather that I handled it with grace and imagination and perspective.

Nostalgia is a trap in my mind. Just because I did something doesn’t make it moral or right. And stories don’t much care how they are read.