The first book I tore to shreds was “‘Salem’s Lot.”

I mean, I wrecked that paperback.

The first time through, I handled it daintily. The cover was black, that barely-there girl all stoic and glaring. There was the single drop of blood at the corner of her mouth.

“A town possessed by unspeakable evil,” went the tag line. By some promising young author named Stephen Something-or-other.

The second time through — that would have been Halloween season sometime in the early ’80s — I started to get a little rough. Bending back the pages, folding the book in half … A few times, I flung the volume at the window because I thought I saw a face out there.

“‘Salem’s Lot,” my friends, is not to be read anywhere near a window.

I began a ritual of reading the novel at the start of each October. Sometimes I’d cheat and read it in August because Halloween just wasn’t coming on quick enough or puberty was just a drag.

The book started to show the signs of my adoration. A corner of the cover was torn. A few dozen pages had weird stains on them. There was a massive crease down the center of the book so that the right side of vampire girl’s face didn’t line up correctly with the right.

Other books on my shelf had begun to exhibit similar symptoms of abuse. “Lord of the Flies” was a mess. It looked as if it had been folded in two, punted into a swamp and then stuck on a spear to dry.

“Call of the Wild” was a barely recognizable heap of paper that looked like it had been eaten by wolves, digested and deposited angrily onto the snow.

“The Catcher in the Rye” looked like Holden Caulfield himself had run it over with a lawn mower.

“The Complete Poe” was a gory sight. It looked like it had been buried beneath the floorboards, dug up, soaked in absinthe and pecked apart by lovesick crows.

“Dracula” was missing both front and back covers and cast no reflection in the mirror. “The Stand” looked older and more weathered than Mother Abigail. David Morrell’s “Brotherhood of the Rose” looked like it had been assassinated and then propped up as an example to other books.

Like everyone who found books to love, my relationship with them was sick. Lifetime Movie Channel sick. The more I loved them, the more shabbily they were treated. I loved some of them so much, the extent of their maiming was such that they had to be put down and replaced.

I still have that original copy of “Salem’s Lot.” It’s a thing of such grand ugliness that babies will cry if they come too near. Cats will hiss and birds will fall dead from the sky. It’s probably a health hazard, but I can’t throw it away. It’s as much a part of my history as a personal diary, albeit one written by someone else and featuring people who don’t really exist.

The thing is, I went out and bought a new copy and I liked that just fine, too. It had a terrible cover — a collector’s edition, I think. Didn’t scare me at all, but once I flipped it open, the story was the same. Familiar vampires scratching at the windows. Same cross-wielding heroes and same dumb asses who wouldn’t believe in vampires if one came up and bit them on the butt.

I’ve been through four or five copies of “Salem’s Lot” and each was as good as the last. So now, when readers get to lamenting the passage of paper and glue, I feel conflicted. I love books. I’m just not sure how morose I should feel that they’re coming at us in other forms these days.

And I’m telling you, I have loved my share of books. I was one of those dorks who went to a keg party with the short stories of O. Henry in his back pocket. I can mark every period of my weird life by which paperback I was carrying around at the time. Long-hair phase? “On the Road.” That period where I talked a lot but never seemed to really say anything (1987-present), “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” The unfortunate period around my sophomore year when I was absolutely convinced I would come into money because I once gave a homeless guy a sandwich? “Great Expectations.”

But last year, I re-read “Oliver Twist” on my iPod Touch. I read it in bed, at the beach, or sitting in the car waiting for my wife to get done doing her wife things. And the story lost nothing. In the end, I was still miffed that little Oliver never learned to kickbox and never went back to punch his tormentors in the groin. It was the same way I felt when I read the must-be-returned classroom handout and the same way I felt when I read the paperback I found at a garage sale in East Boothbay.

I suppose my incomplete opinion is that if the story is good, the delivery system doesn’t matter so much. It’s the meat I crave, not the bread.

Although a compelling argument could be made that in some sandwiches, the bread is every bit as important as the meat that sits within it.

And so, yes. Conflicted. Every now and then I’m asked to write a story about another brick-and-mortar bookstore going under. Every time it happens, it feels like we’re that much closer to downloading books directly into our heads instead of plucking them off shelves made of wood.

I grew up browsing the shelves of Mr. Paperback in Waterville. It’s where I discovered King and London, Poe and Crane, Tom Robbins and some magazines I probably shouldn’t mention. And while Mr. Paperback is alive and doing well everywhere else, the store here in Lewiston quietly went under like so many of the others.

Hard to compete with the big chains, they say. Hard to sell books made of paper when so many readers are turning to the digital copies. You can’t pick up a digital book and sniff it, it’s true. A digital book doesn’t smell like ink and paper — the literary equivalent of new-mown grass — but you can get one for about a tenth the cost of a hardcover and it takes up the space of one electrode in your pocket, if you have an e-book reader or a smart phone.

People are turning to e-books like crazy. For every e-book downloaded onto an iPad, there’s a paperback that will never get plucked off the shelf at the corner book store, and that’s sad. Sad like when the family radio hour died at the aerial hands of television. Sad like when DVD technology kneed VHS in the groin, said mean things about its momma and chucked it through a window. Sad like the day widescreen, high-definition television supplanted the inferior boxes of antiquity I have at my house.

Books are at risk of becoming quaint relics, things you’ll one day find at flea markets and marvel over. Things you will admit to recalling when it’s 2045 and you and the other 40-year-olds are playing Remember When. Books are facing obsolescence and that ought to make me scream with regret and defiance.

But, nope. I keep thinking about the last time I read “Oliver Twist” and how the story didn’t turn shallow and dull just because I couldn’t stain the pages or smell the binding. I keep thinking that, sooner or later, we really will download books directly into our heads and man, how weird that will be for the ladies of the book clubs. I keep thinking about how the cassette was better than the 8-track and I’m OK with it.

Of course, the first time “‘Salem’s Lot” gets ruined because it didn’t download correctly to my cerebellum, I’ll change my tune. If I don’t read that sucker at the start of October, Halloween is completely ruined for me.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can download emails into his cerebellum at [email protected].