I will never forget the first book that made me cry.

I was 12, and wide awake at two in the morning. The main character had just died a sacrificial death. Tears streamed down my cheeks, and I howled into my pillow. 

The words were so real. Each sentence in that book had a purpose. Every letter curated in a particular order to create a story in a reader’s head.

That is the beauty of a book. No pictures, no effects, and no sound, just words. Yet, your thoughts are full of images, movements, and feelings.

It takes a long time to process all of that. For example, “Fifty Shades of Grey” is a 514-page book that you can listen to on Audible in 19 hours and 48 minutes. However, a two-hour and five-minute movie was created based on this book. Imagine the amount of information lost in the transition to the screen. Articles were written about which scenes in the book would not make the movie. The budget, production plans, and timeline of this kind of movie makes it  nearly impossible to fit each detail of a novel into one movie.

A movie cannot replace a book. In fact, releases of book-based movies usually increase sales of the book itself. Just a week after “The Hunger Games” movie was released in March 2012, publisher Scholastic announced that there were 36.5 million copies of “The Hunger Games” trilogy in print, a 55% jump from the 23.5 million copies in print at the start of 2012. In April 2012, Hypable, an entertainment news website, reported over 24 million of those copies were sold. As more people watched the movie, they fell in love with the concept and craved further intimacy with the characters. Intimacy you can only get if you read the book.

I  still remember sitting on the edge of my seat in the theater as I was introduced to the world of Katniss Everdeen. The next day, I checked the book out of the library and my eyes stayed glued to each page, hung on every word. I was like that for weeks as I read the entire trilogy. It was as if I had known Katniss for years. I could predict what she would do next in the story before I read it, but it took more than sitting down for a two-hour movie to feel that way. I had read each book cover to cover, each detail, each thought.

Books have no restriction of time.There are an endless number of pages waiting to be filled with stories and fairytales.