It’s about six months ago that I first wrote about electronic books when I rabbited on about the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader that really only caught my attention properly because its name is so similar to my surname, Kendle. And while I, in theory, “get” all the advantages of an e-book device, I still have absolutely no desire to throw away my “real” books.
So I was fairly pleased to see that one of my favourite writers, Nick Hornby, agrees with me. Strictly speaking I agree with him, but I did write my Kindle piece long before this article quoting him appeared (last week) at PC Pro. It was a bit of a beat-up (how exciting can a magazine like PC Pro be, really) but they quoted Hornby as saying, “they are so expensive that even multi-millionaire stars don’t want them”. I suspect that multi-millionaire stars don’t actually read that many books, electronic or paper or otherwise, but that’s beside the point.
As Hornby rightly points out, the readers themselves are relatively expensive. Yes, the books you then buy for them are quite cheap, but not that many people read enough books in a year to actually justify the expense. And then the people who do read a lot of books are people like me, real book-lovers, who want the full experience of admiring the cover, turning the pages, smelling a new book, and all those other odd things we love about real, physical books.
About a month ago I saw somebody reading a book using an electronic reader. He was sitting on the train and seemed quite happy, but to be honest, he did have the appearance of a computer geek kind of guy. I would dearly have liked to interrupt him and ask him all the questions I have: does it hurt your eyes? Is it easy to read? Does it really make the experience easier than physically turning the pages? Does the sun really never reflect badly off that screen? And so on. I didn’t, because he seemed rather engrossed. So I’m still severely suspicious of the whole idea and despite the fact that storing books electronically would reduce the storage space needed in my house by a vast proportion, I love, LOVE my physical books, and dearly hope that by the time I have my own books published, most consumers are still also in love with physical books.
Any e-book readers out there? Anyone who agrees with me on the physical book love thing? Do share!
