I’m very much behind the times here but let’s go for it anyway.
I’m talking about Kindles, as if you haven’t guessed. We were arguing ten years ago about paper books vs electronic books and by now, everyone’s settled on their side of the argument.
I was on the paper side. I still am, broadly. I didn’t buy my Kindle; I inherited it when no one in the family wanted it. I can’t let non-obsolete technology go unwanted and unloved. Given the condition of its previous owner, it needed a wash before I could use it (yes, with soap and water. Yes, I was careful. Yes, we both survived) and a new case and, to be honest, a new charging cable. And, of course, I had to remove all the 1930s plays and Jeffrey Archer books from it.
The truth is, I already had a small stash of my own Kindle books because I’d already downloaded the Kindle app on my phone during a long minibus drive in Iceland. That’s the good thing about the Kindle. If you get bored, you can make a book appear. If you finish your book, you can make another one appear. If you inherit a Kindle, you can make all those books appear on it.
Oh yes. It’s also useful for sending your own manuscript to so you can sit and edit in a pub in south London while waiting for a comedy show to start. Did I mention I wrote a book?
I don’t use the Kindle much. I usually take it when I’m travelling because we all know the benefits of its books-to-space ratio. I find it particularly useful at the Edinburgh Fringe when I’m carrying a pretty small bag and spending a lot of time in queues, waiting to go into shows. Pull out the Kindle and the queue seems to vanish before you. In 2013 I took three or four physical books and finished them – sometimes halfway through a queue. Even better, if the queue moves suddenly, you can usually shove the Kindle in a pocket.
How you can tell I use it for travel: it’s got my baggage reclaim sticker permanently stuck on the inside of the case.
Three years ago I’d have said I don’t like reading things on a screen but we all know that’s not true. I spend all day every day reading things on a screen. I get paid to read things on a screen. It’s true that switching from paper books to ebooks feels more jarring than realising you get more news from Twitter these days than the newspapers but it’s not really very different.
The downside of the Kindle is that it’s less obviously easy to read in the bath. I mean, paper books will be destroyed if you drop them in the water so they’re not really that different but I guess the Kindle is more expensive and I have no idea whether the battery is powerful enough to electrocute you. But I have a small collection of waterproof cases so I can take the Kindle in the bath perfectly safely (they’re mostly so I can take my phone and my camera in hot springs in Iceland. Saying that, I did write the first draft of this post in the bath with my phone in it’s waterproof case).
Now, while I find the Kindle useful, I don’t know if I’ll rush to replace it when it eventually dies – although being a relatively simple piece of technology, it’s not had anything go wrong yet in the two and a half years I’ve possessed it and it mostly only needs one charge per trip away, which makes it very nearly as convenient as a real book.
But I still read real books at home, unless I’m still finishing the book I started at the airport on the way home. Ebooks feel inexplicably too valuable to waste on reading at home. This may – or equally may not – be related to the fact that they cost much the same as paper books and yet because you don’t receive a bound pile of paper, they feel less substantial. Less value for money and therefore not to be wasted. But that’s just the idiot part of my brain.
Kindles are great. I use one. But real books are still better.
I wrote a book – a real paper one. I haven’t figured out how to format it for Kindle yet. But if you like real books, and you like books about adventures in the frozen wastes of Northern Europe, go and buy it.
It’s called Minus Twelve and it’s available right here
