My husband, who may officially be the Kindest Man In The World, has bought me a Kindle Paperwhite. This came after a week of me complaining about tremendous headaches caused by trying to do the majority of my reading from bright white screens.
From an eye strain point of view, and also from a not having to hold a massive heavy book in my arthritic hands point of view, it’s absolutely fantastic! There are a few things about it which bother me though. Not least the logistics of how you go about citing something in your research when there aren’t any page numbers.
My main issue though, is that it’s weird having invisible books.
I love books. My degree was in Typography & Graphic Communication which, at the time, was a 50/50 split between practical graphic design work (which I was not very good at), and learning all about the history and materiality of books (which I absolutely loved).
My bedroom is lined with books which are overflowing from the shelves and stacked on the floor. My office has one wall entirely covered with bookshelves. I love how they look, how they smell, how they feel. I love thinking “oh yes, that passage was towards the top of a right hand page, quite near the beginning”, and being able to pick up the book, flick through, and find it. You can’t do that with a Kindle.
I also quite often sell my books, or give them away to charity shops, when my interests change. Which they do. A lot.
It makes me feel quite sad to know that my Kindle books will never have that second life. They’ll never give another person the joy of walking into a second-hand bookshop and picking up exactly what they needed. They’ll just sit there, in the ether, taking up virtual space until I eventually delete them.
It turns out that I feel sorry for my Kindle, because it’s not a book.