When I first heard about ebooks, I was horrified. Something deep within me flinched. Surely, I thought – my surface brain trying to rationalise this atavistic spasm – the tactile reality of books is an intrinsic part of the joy of books?
Nowadays I only read a physical book if there really is no alternative
The satisfying crack of opening up a new hardback (sorry to the timid but I love getting my thumbs in). The unmistakable aroma, from the vanilla hint of co-polymers in the freshly minted paperback to the cigar smoke and benzaldehyde in the second or possibly fourteenth-hand copy. The satisfaction of turning a page, being surprised by the unexpected ending of a chapter and shoving in a bookmark. Wouldn’t the sterile hard edges of a tablet or God forbid a phone take all that away? How could scrolling and swiping compare to turning pages with your fingers? It would be like the difference between eating a steak and looking at the clip art of a steak.
But, I am still slightly ashamed to admit, I am now a convert. Nowadays I only read a physical book if there really is no alternative and I find it a tedious experience of myopic straining and carpal tunnel syndrome.
I admit that yes, there are drawbacks. A dedicated reading device rather than a phone or tablet is the ideal. With phones and tablets, used for anything and everything else, there is always the danger of notifications. With a physical book there is/was always the possibility of the phone ringing, or the outside world breaking in in some way. But tablets bring this risk much closer, right into the reading experience.
If we said yes to all notifications from apps our lives would not be our own for all the bells and whistles. But there are some apps that you need to have burbling in the background. So you can be engrossed, for example, in Anna Karenina when suddenly O2 pop up to remind you of early access to tickets for Nickelback’s Get Rollin’ World Tour. Or maybe Poirot has assembled all the suspects in the drawing room and you’re just about to find out who killed the lord of the manor when you hear the good news that your Sainsbury’s order has no missing items.
Muting notifications from your reading app itself is absolutely essential. The Kindle app’s system of rewards, badges and gamified reading comes across as a nagging five-a-day nanny mixed with a pom-pomming cheerleader. ‘You beat your streak! Way to go!’ it will shriek as if you were running to score a touchdown. ‘You can smash it, champ – two more pages of The Brothers Karamazov, yeah you got this!’
Kindle also has an irritating habit of shoving a drop down menu at the instant you reach the last page of a book. That can be a very special moment of reflection. So, for example, let’s say you’re digesting the end of Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday and contemplating the inexorably tragic march of history and the triumph of barbarism when suddenly a box descends to steer you, using Amazon’s laser-focused AI algorithms, to your next read, Christmas Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. (Such final moment hustling are also the bane of YouTube and Netflix, at which point they become like hawkers in an old bazaar.)
But the benefits are worth these minor irritations. In the little flats and boxy rooms of Britain, even a small library is unfeasible, particularly if you like to hang on to books you’ve read for reference. Thanks to ebooks, I now have acres of space again. A little clutter can be aesthetically pleasing but I’ve had times when my environment could be taken for one of those properties that you see people in hazmat suits pick-axing into in Channel 5 documentaries called ‘No Room To Swing A Cat – Extreme Hoarders’.
And reference becomes the work of seconds. Yes, there is something romantic about physically searching for things with your arms and hands, but the ability to search for words or do a screen shot to add to your intangible ‘commonplace’ photo folder is much safer. An overstuffed bookcase can be a very dangerous thing.
Yes, it’s possible that a woke publisher will one night surreptitiously ‘update’ your library to remove fat people and accurate descriptions of transvestites. And there might indeed one day be a technological outage that wipes everything. But when that day comes we will all probably have bigger things to worry about.
E reading has also made big books and long books far less off-putting. I have a beloved old historical atlas that needs two big lads with a block and tackle just to get down from the shelf, let alone open. You have to be sat at the dining table to have a hope of taming it. The ebook version is a few gentle taps, plus you can zoom for detail. And with an ebook, you can tell how far you are with mathematical precision and choose to see if you’ve got the time to read a chapter, which is most convenient. Short books also seem less frivolous because of the standardisation – everything is the same and only you see it.
And this is my favourite thing about ebooks. They are great levellers. You just can’t show off your reading in public. This is perhaps a shame for the kind of reader who loves to signal their cultural savviness on trains or in cafés. But it also means you can read any old trash right out in the open without anybody knowing. For a person like me who’s both a literary snob and a secret devourer of rubbish, this has been a great relief. I love ebooks.
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