THERE’S an argument in progress over the dinner table. It’s about books, those things with paper and spines that disintegrate when you read them in the bath. I’m not saying my companions are technophobe Luddites but they are vigorously dissuading me from buying a Kindle. ‘Why, on earth would you want one – what can replace the pleasure of a real book?’
The more they remonstrate about the joys of turning pages, skim reading and borrowing a book from another’s bookcase, the more determinedly I defend the e-book. It’s not just that our attic is stacked with boxes of paperbacks that are never reread because their pages have fallen out and the print is impossible to read from the foxed and yellowing paper, nor is it the fact that when I bought last year’s Booker prize winner, Wolf Hall, it was abandoned for it felt I’d need a fork lift truck to carry it. It’s because, unlike my companions, none of who have actually read anything on a Kindle, I tried one and it was surprisingly good. It even came with its own little leather cover. OK, you can’t easily skim backwards to remind yourself of what happened a few pages before, but you can store an incredible 1500 books in its memory and adjust the font for failing eyes and read its backlit screen on the beach.. I go online to Amazon and discover, not surprisingly, they have sold out, there’s a waiting list: ‘bestselling item for two years running… the most-wished-for, most-gifted…product on Amazon.com.’ Now I really want one.
I start to think of all the advantages: limitless books online; free download of classics; instant access to Lonely Planet guides, encyclopaedias and the morning’s newspapers. I think of the ease of carrying on journeys, especially with the increasingly ferocious travel restrictions, I think of never running out of reading material and then a drawback dawns: those moments sitting in cafes and trains, bars and buses when a casual conversation has been sparked by the book in mine or another’s hand. The commuter reading a favourite novelist; the girl with her Rough Guide to India; the student studying; the child with Calvin and Hobbes; the person who asks to borrow your paper. For all that disappears with the anonymity of a screen, e-books are private, secret, obscuring our reading lives from prying eyes.
Suddenly, I remember I like sharing books, lending them to friends, cuddling up with the kids at bedtime, browsing the bookshelves of those I meet for clues to their lives and especially lingering on cold winter days in the comforting warmth of a bookshop.
I cancel my order.
But it’s futile, for I know once the new technology exists the old is doomed, like love letters tied with ribbon in shoe boxes or neat stacks of vinyl albums, one day our well stocked book case will be simply be a nostalgic memory to read about …on a Kindle….
