Introducing books.torontoist.com!

The internet, many people like to remark offhand, is killing print. With a twenty-four-hour news cycle better served by the instant response times of broadcast and online outlets (including the online arms of print publications who will run those same stories in the next morning's paper), e-books finally taking off, and shortening attention spans that prize bells and whistles over the sedate pleasures of slow perusal, the old-fashioned printed word is facing hard times. Or so this line of thought goes.

We have to disagree.

We're fans of the online world, of course—we're denizens of it, after all—but we maintain, along with many other lovers of words, that nothing will ever beat curling up with a book: in bed before falling asleep, on a sleepy Sunday on the couch, on subways, in parks—the feel of actual pages in our hands is irresistible. Not to mention that browsing in a real live bookstore, one with people to bump into and clerks to advise us and the whiff of ink in the air, makes a virtual trip to an online shop seem positively dreary by comparison. We make a point of taking a book with us whenever we leave the house, and we bet that lots of you do, too.

It is thus with a great deal of excitement that we announce that Torontoist's first ever satellite site, books.torontoist.com, will be a hub devoted to the irreplaceable tomes we love to love. We're equally thrilled to welcome a new books editor into the Torontoist fold: James Grainger, the former review editor and a current contributing editor at Quill & Quire.

Books.torontoist.com will be a hub for all things having to do with books and authors in Toronto, and quite possibly books the world over when we happen to like them enough, too. We're planning on covering the spectrum: reviews, interviews, video chats, industry news, and probably a bunch of things we haven't thought of yet. It'll be a hub for all the books coverage that appears on our main site right here, and will also feature some exclusive posts meant for those of you who can't get enough literary coverage.

So, while we don't usually ask you to leave this page that you're looking at right now, we cordially invite you to click on over to books.torontoist.com and get reading.