I’ve mentioned Kindles and tablets a few times in past blog posts and I’ve just remembered one particular journey I did some years ago that brought very much to a head the sheer convenience of carrying an entire library in your pocket.
I was driving from Andorra to the UK in a fully-loaded car. Fully loaded, more to the point, with four large and heavy boxes of books, a mixture of hard backs and paperbacks. Four boxes of books that I had had to hump into the back of the car in Andorra, and then unload the same boxes at the house in France. And then load them into the car again when we left Monpazier and, predictably enough, unload them again back in Sevenoaks. To add insult to injury, they weren’t even books I’d written, just books I’d read.
When I’ve finished a physical book which I don’t think I will want to read again, I always do the same thing: I put it in a box so that I can take it to a charity shop. The slight problem I had when I was living in Andorra was that the charity shops I normally used were in Kent, hence the reason for loading the boxes into the back of the car. There was clearly no point in giving English-language books to a charity shop in Andorra where the national and principal language is Catalan and most people speak and read that and either Spanish or French. Or all three. But not, crucially, English.
These days, my back doesn’t ache the way it used to, and in part that’s thanks to Amazon.
Now, I almost never go into a bookshop to buy a book. About all I might do is have a browse through the paperbacks on offer in a charity shop. But not because I’m cheap, though that could also be a factor. The reality is that I have thoroughly embraced the sheer convenience and flexibility of electronic texts. I’ve always thought that I would much prefer the physical experience of actually holding a book in my hand, looking at the cover, reading the blurb, and then with a growing sense of anticipation opening it up and beginning to lose myself in somebody else’s adventure.
Of course, I still enjoy doing that, but I do it all on a Kindle, or in my case on a tablet, but it’s the message, not the medium, that’s important. And the Kindle offers features that make the act of reading a book so much easier. It remembers exactly where you were in the text when you stopped reading it, so there’s no need to turn over the corner of the page or stick in a bookmark or anything like that. And if there’s a passage that you want to refer to later, you can add a virtual bookmark to the page, search the entire text for particular references and add your own notes to the text as well, all without altering the integrity of the original manuscript. Personally, I always got irritated when people marked books, because I think it’s selfish to deface an author’s work with your own personal opinions, but with the Kindle it simply doesn’t matter.
And when you also remember that you can load an effectively unlimited number of books onto the device, the further advantages of carrying your entire library in your pocket become very, very clear.
In fact, it’s got to the point where the first thing I look at on Amazon is not the price of the book I’m interested in, or the number of reviews it’s had, or its star rating. It’s whether or not I can buy it as a Kindle download and, if I can’t, I find that in itself very irritating to the extent that it may well sway my purchase decision.
I’ve even come to resent the fact that if I do buy a hardback or paperback from Amazon for some reason, I have to wait a day or two for the book to be delivered to me, whereas if I buy a Kindle download, I can start reading the text within literally about thirty seconds. Talk about convenience?
This device is so seductive, and so useful, that I genuinely believe that within a very few years almost anyone who reads more than one or two books a year – I personally read about that many every week – will have a Kindle and will use it in preference to buying a physical volume, for all the reasons I’ve listed above.
So does the invention of the Kindle mean the death of books? The question’s been asked many times before by people who know far more about the publishing industry than I do, and the short snappy answer is that nobody actually knows. Personally, I don’t think it does.
There are a number of different types of book, especially large-format and non-fiction titles that are heavily illustrated, and the standard Kindle does not handle images particularly well because they are so small and they have to be depicted in varying shades of grey. If you’re looking a photograph of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, say, you clearly won’t be seeing it at its best on a Kindle. On the other hand, using the Kindle app on a tablet with the ability to zoom in you’ll actually see more detail than just looking at a photograph.
And for novels and other books that most readers will purchase, read once and then discard, the Kindle is absolutely the ideal medium.
