So, as predicted, I did buy a Kindle. We had an uneasy stand off for a week or two: I downloaded cheap or free classics, a dozen trial first chapters and I somewhat regretted its greyness and ugliness. We did not like each other, the Kindle and I. And then I accidentally got hooked on a giant doorstopper of a book, a positive housebrick, in a week in which I was travelling a lot and carrying other things which left no room for the housebrick. But I needed to read the housebrick. So I choked back my inner puritan (‘But you’ve got the hardback free from the library already! Why pay £6.99 for something you already have, can’t lend to a friend or re-sell?’) and lo! the housebrick was a feather and I read it everywhere, not noticing that there was housebrick in my hands, not noticing that I had just changed my life forever.
Next I bought the expensive Penguin e-book of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady causing the inner puritan almost fatal blood pressure issues (‘You already have the paperback version! It’s not heavy! You could get a free version of this!’) because I wanted the Penguin notes and introduction but not the slightly depressing yellowed pages of the old paperback. Suddenly, I realised that without the distraction of paper, the attempt not to break the spine, the awkward flipping from a page on one side of the volume to the other, and with only bite size pieces of unparagraphed Jamesian prose, the reading experience was totally immersive. It was a pure reading experience that swallowed me up as I haven’t been swallowed since reading as a child. It is the opposite of the scattering of attention that I thought might come from too much choice.
Now the Kindle and I love each other. We are never separated. I have read seven novels on it in just over three weeks. I took the Kindle on holiday but hedged my bets with three actual books as back up. I didn’t touch the books. I downloaded the Saturday papers in less than a minute for 99p each. I finished Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child and immediately downloaded and read The Line of Beauty. I am reading more now than I have in years.
I am but a humble reader and have no idea if e-books will kill or save publishing. The Financial Times has a very good article on the state of play and Sam Leith at the Guardian also has an interesting take on the issue (and which deserves a far less dull title than Is This the End for Books?)
If my experience is typical, this is just the beginning of a new, initially painful perhaps, but ultimately exciting change of format for written creativity. My thirteen year old twin daughters used to be voracious readers until their attention was diverted to Blackberry status updates, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube all the shallow stuff that we old folks bemoan. I could get them to the library at holiday time only because their mobile phone contracts didn’t include foreign roaming. This year, in my evangelism, I bought them Kindles, registered them all to my account so that we could share all the books we each downloaded and I watched them read. And read. And read even in preference to switching on their laptops when we got home. They are very, very comfortable with reading on screens and, presented electronically rather than on paper, they were gripped by fiction once more. They and their generation are the future for publishing if it wants to have one. Concentrate on excellent content and let the format take care of itself.
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