At the end of February, Stylist columnist Lucy Mangan said said 'E-readers are representative of our mindless embrace of all that purports to be 'progress''. Then a month later fellow blogger Russell Ward described the Kindle as 'cold and calculating in its determination to deliver the electronic word seamlessly to you'.Ouch!
Admittedly I was a slow convert, clinging on to both the physical and the ritual around my serious book habit. And I still love a good book shop browse. In fact last week I had an hour to kill before meeting A-used-to-be-down-the-hill and I spent it wandering through Foyles at St Pancras Station, perusing the latest dust jackets, dipping into travel guides (I'm off to Rome for a little city break soon) and flicking through the pages of Titanic-themed tomes in the special event section. Lovely stuff.
But the thought of finding more space in my already full bookshelf, packed with old theatre programs, illustrated coffee table books - for which I have no coffee table - and those volumes dubbed with 're-read me status' or acquired in youthful nostalgia (my hard back Jane Austen set and the 7-book Chronicles of Narnia being a couple of these) before my Kindle conversion, holds little allure.
On the other hand my Kindle - christened Audrey for her stylish simplicity - goes everywhere with me. There is nothing cool or calculating about immersing myself in a few quick chapters while on the bus, waiting for a friend, in the boarding lounge and even before lights out at night. Audrey is always at the ready and the Kindle shop only a few clicks away. Apart from my favourites, both old and new, I've discovered authors I would never have come across and been able to support the burgeoning efforts of a couple of budding writers in my blogging circle - just check out 2011's Book Nook numbers 51, 55a and 57.
Granted a Kindle is not the be all and end all. After all, there is nothing like a travel book for sitting on the plane, standing on a street corner in a new city or sipping espresso in a funky cafe, marking the places to be seen with folded corners and scribbled annotations and plotting my next adventure(s).
And I haven't quite managed the conversion of my magazine or Saturday Times newspaper habit yet but let's face it, the only way to conquer the Samurai Sudoku or the cryptic version of the Jumbo Crossword is curled up on my couch, pen in hand, steaming coffee at my elbow.
But villifying the Kindle and all its counterparts seems a little extreme. Like laptops, smartphones and iPods, the e-reader is just another symbol of our increasingly mobile lives and to my mind, something that encourages the consumption of the written word in every place or space. And that can only be a good thing.
Books still have their place in my life. But for me the power lies in the storytelling.
And I get to take that everywhere.
5 comments:
Great post! I love books and I love my kindle. Why do some people think they are mutually exclusive?
I agree. You can have both. I very much doubt that Kindle will kill off the printed word. If anything, I think it'll get more people reading which has got to be a good thing.
Thanks to both of you. Anything that encourages reading always has my vote!
I have just started to read a proper book for the first time in ages - The Hare With Amber Eyes, if anyone's interested - and after only a year with a Kindle, I'm now programmed to click on the side of a page to turn it.
But no, I don't know why ereaders are a mindless embrace of progress. According to one source, 53% of those with ereaders say they read more than they did before. How can that be bad? It's the modern-day Caxton revolution.
Hear hear Kate. Thanks for your comments and for that useful stat. 53% eh? I shall bandy that around the next time those Kindle naysayers get 'gobby'!
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