My wife and son gave me an Amazon Kindle electronic book reader for Christmas. I’m delighted, yet disturbed.
I’ve had a lifelong love affair with books, the printed kind. They helped me survive childhood by showing me that other children faced problems just like mine; and, best of all, they allowed me to escape into magical worlds of imagined reality.
Now I’m growing old, books help me put life in perspective, and have led me to realise that it’s the inevitability of death that gives life meaning.
One of the intellectual pleasures of old age is the recognition that many of the things that seemed so important when you were young now hardly matter. Authors I once loved now bore me and others I disliked, like Henry James, enchant me.
You have to be old to love James. Those long meandering sentences – filled with subtleties and nuances – that go nowhere and leave you gasping for meaning are not for the young.
The Ambassadors, which I just re-read, is a magnificent novel, but one best kept away from youngsters under 60.
The Kindle is an amazing device. It’s about the size and weight of a small paperback.
You download e-books direct to the Kindle from Amazon, using either the same technology as a mobile phone, except Amazon meets all the communication costs. Or you can use Wi-Fi.
And here’s the best part: there are loads of (out-of-copyright) books you can download for free from Amazon and other websites like Project Gutenberg. In the case of the other websites, you download them on to your computer and then transfer to the Kindle through the cable that comes with it.
For someone like me who’s tired of struggling to read books with small print, the enormous advantage of the Kindle is you can increase the size of the font to one that suits you. Moreover, the Kindle uses the new Pearl “electronic ink” display technology that provides a crisp, no-glare text that’s easier on the eyes.
It’s not a book, though; and I’ve always loved the sight, feel and smell of books.
The Kindle has no scent. Its touch is cold and impersonal. It’s a machine.
Of course, I tell myself, what I’m doing is confusing the medium with the message or content. And it’s the content that ultimately matters. I now have some 30 books by the 19th century English novelist Anthony Trollope on my Kindle.
Amazingly, I’ve never read any of his novels before, but now fantasize about curling up in bed with an exciting Trollope while my wife lies asleep beside me. I already have over 300 works on my Kindle: Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Austen, Conrad, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, not to mention Wodehouse, Kipling, Zane Grey and Haggard, a small fortune in books that haven’t cost me a cent.
The other huge plus of the Kindle is you can store almost 4 000 books on it, so when you’re away from home, either on vacation abroad or simply on a visit to the doctor’s office, you can take a whole library with you.
Right now only a minority of books published are available in the e-book format. But this is rapidly changing. Whether we like it or not the e-book will eventually replace the paper book.
In this digital age anything that can be digitised will be.
I lament the passing of paper books and treasure the thousand or more I own, now yellowing, dog-eared and spattered with my cryptic notes.
But although I enjoy occasionally using my calligraphy fountain pen, I know I could no longer write without the use of a computer.
On my bedside table there’s a tottering stack of paper books, with the Kindle perched precariously on top, like a paperweight.
We of this older generation straddle two ages.
Let us be thankful for that.
• Peter Laurie is a retired diplomat and a commentator on social issues. Email [email protected]
