Something that always makes me want to rant is the mention of the wireless device that Amazon brought out a couple of years ago: The Kindle.
So the idea is you can buy digital copies of books off Amazon, download them and carry them around on what looks like either a large phone or a small laptop. Ok, yes it’s an e-reader, but to me it just appears to be yet another version of the merged gadget that so many of us now use: basic mobile phone, iPhone, iPod, MP3 player…an e-reader falls easily into that list. In fact, you can even use your iPhone to access Kindle books without the need for an actual Kindle. No surprise there, what can’t you do with an iPhone?
A vivid memory from my childhood is the dog-eared, brown pages of the Enid Blyton books passed down to me from my Mum’s own childhood. I can almost still smell the mustiness of the books, which were stored in an enormous brown box in the corner of my room, and eventually ended up strewn across my floor or piled untidily high on my bookshelf.
Evenings sat reading with my parents when I was very young or curled up in an armchair by the fire with a gripping novel as I got older. Unable to keep my eyelids open as I struggle to keep reading late at night, before falling asleep with the book on my pillow. I even enjoyed trips to the library (and confess that I still do!) to peruse the shelves for hours, picking out the best books, and mostly the ones with the eye-catching covers. Holidays spent lying on the beach with a book to shield my face from the sun. Train, bus and car journeys spent reading, sitting reading in the garden in the summer time.
Books shape many of our experiences, just as newspapers did and still do. Picturing myself sat with a portable e-reader does not really conjure the same warm image. Just as I stressed with an earlier post about the days of the thriving newspaper, I honestly feel saddened at the thought of paperback books deteriorating into nothing. It may be ten or twenty years, but the fact is that books are timeless and if at any stage they were to stop existing in a physical form, it would be heartbreaking.
Yes, it all sounds depressing, but this is where the tiptoeing of the Kindle is taking us right? If it were to take off successfully, people would no longer need to buy books in shops anymore and could just download the text any time they fancy a read. What are we trying to do? Suck the authenticity out of everything real? These are objects which shape lives and form memories. Having them present online just does not offer the same believability element.
How can text on the screen of a wireless device replace the smells, textures and visual memories of a book, which may have passed down through decades or even centuries. It feels almost like there are less and less physical products existing as time moves on; the world we are moving towards with this Kindle idea is a world where emails replace handwritten letters, and e-cards take over from Christmas or birthday cards…where does it stop?
