Absolution from Kindle Guilt

I love libraries and I love books. I'm an English student, so this comes as no surprise - it's pretty much in the contract. While this degree may push the boundaries of my motivation for reading to the absolute maximum at times, I still retain my love for books as objects. I may not wish to actually read all the lovely books that line the shelves of the various libraries in Cambridge I flit in and out of, but I like the idea that I might read them. I like the smell of the pages, and the rows of coloured spines, and I like carefully sliding a book out of its place and opening it up. If I see a book on my reading list which is available both online and as a physical copy, I will always go and fetch the physical copy. Libraries are such quietly magical places, and I hate the idea of them becoming obsolete as the world digitalises itself.

So, guess who got a Kindle for Christmas?

It feels like the ultimate betrayal of my principles. Books are sacred and they are wonderful. There are so many things that I adore about actual books that are substituted for cold, emotionless digital features on the Kindle. The rustling swoosh of a turned page is replaced with a quiet click of the navigation buttons. The practice of spending hours happily arranging your book collection by period and genre (oh yes, I have done this) is replaced with menu options to instantly sort your list of titles by various criteria. The opinion-dividing practices of scribbling in the margin and folding over corners to remember your page or mark a favourite passage are done away with - the Kindle kindly remembers your place and has a neat little function which allows you to electronically underline passages, as well as make notes (although in practice, the Kindle 4's lack of a physical keyboard makes typing, which must be done using an on-screen keyboard and tracker buttons, a pain in the arse). I still cannot quite convince myself that this clever little device quite lives up to the emotional fulfilment of having a real, physical book with pages.

And yet I am absolutely in love with my new toy. It may not be quite the timeless symbol of literature that a book is, but it is beautiful in its own way. It is sleek, compact and light. The display is crisp and clear. The lovely black-and-white images that act as a screensaver - photographs of typewriter keys, newspapers, fountain pens and pencils - marry the aesthetically pleasing nature of physical writing and reading tools with the technology of this newest development in the way we consume literature. And not all of the things I love about books are entirely lost. Father Christmas also brought me a gorgeous (and rather overpriced) leather cover to protect my Kindle, which serves two purposes: it gives me an actual cover to open up when I want to read, and it has a nice leathery smell which somewhat mitigates the loss of the smell of paper.

It has also given me back something I haven't indulged in for quite some time: the joy of reading for pleasure. For less than a pound each, I downloaded Emma and The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; I also got eleven other classic novels for free. On Christmas Day, I couldn't keep away from Emma, and the feeling of being absorbed in a book is something I thought my degree had pretty much destroyed - I seem to have spent a lot of my time in Cambridge struggling through difficult books that I neither enjoy nor understand (though that's a topic for another post - I will not taint this exposition on the wonder of reading with the woes of reading things I hate). The Kindle both makes me feel obliged to read for pleasure to get the most out of it, which is not an unpleasant obligation at all, and makes reading quite novel and exciting again.

The one major drawback is not to do with the Kindle itself, it's to do with the reaction of others. People I have shown it to have mainly fallen into two camps: the 'Oh I have one too, isn't it wonderful' camp, and the 'Oh I prefer real books' camp. Members of the latter camp pick it up, inspect it, comment on the cleverness of the device, and then say, 'But it's not a real book, is it? I prefer a real book'. Now, I know I've just expressed similar doubts myself, but oh, the smugness of some people! It's as though not possessing a Kindle allows you a sort of moral superiority, while Kindle owners are looked down upon for contributing to the destruction of the book. Darkly, people mutter about the evils of new technology. Well, no longer will I stand for this traditionalist snobbery - it's time for me to say my self-righteous piece! Which consists mainly of two points: firstly, I read a shedload of actual, physical books. My course demands it. I cannot reference from my Kindle, as it has no page numbers, so I will continue to read books - far more than the average person. I refuse to be accused, therefore, of allowing the book to die. And secondly, no matter my attachment to the book as an entity, at the end of the day reading is reading. I will get as much mental improvement out of reading a book on the Kindle as from reading it in paper form. And if the Kindle has even the slightest chance of making reading cool, I am all for it. The reading is the important part. We're all accustomed to taking our gadgets everywhere we go - phones, iPods, laptops - so if the Kindle inserts reading into the gadget world and makes it something we can't go without, then that is a brilliant thing. So let us make peace, traditionalists - let Kindle users and book readers join hands and be united in revelling in the written word, in whatever medium we choose to consume it!