Reflections on the different mediums of reading

A few days ago, a friend of mine was bragging about having purchased the Kindle. For those not in the know, the Amazon Kindle is the e-book for the 21st century- a fancy portable device to read and store electronic books. I haven’t actually seen a Kindle, but there’s been a growing buzz about it and it keeps cropping up in media reports. When my friend began to talk about its’ merits, I felt a shiver run down my spine and it had nothing to do with the atrocious weather. Now at the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I’m pretty terrified of the Kindle. The straightforward reason is that I’m an old-fashioned book-lover. Many of my most treasured childhood memories revolve around reading second-hand books that my mother used to buy for me in Kampala. Sometimes the books were glossy and in perfect condition, and sometimes they were tattered with the kind of careworn features that strongly suggested that they had seen better days a long time ago. Either way, they provided priceless experiences in my formative years. The mere act of holding a book was exciting- the smell and feel of it were all part of the experience. The thrill of having words coming alive was quite an exquisite one and it’s a thrill that’s never left me. But my love for physical books isn’t just some rose-tinted celebration of my childhood (or indeed my adulthood as I still read obviously). The Kindle feels like an attempt to make reading glamorous and books unfashionable. Owning the Kindle then becomes more of a fashion statement and a statement that you are on the cutting-edge. Ultimately it begs the question: why fix what isn’t broken? The book in its physical form is remarkably simple but wondrous all the same. The Kindle appears to be trying to ‘improve’ the reading experience or perhaps make it more convenient but either attempt misses the point. My attitude to the Kindle could charitably be described as ambivalent, but my views are a lot stronger when it comes to another alternative to reading: the audio book. I absolutely loathe it. At least the Kindle preserves the basic essence of reading a book: the actual act of reading. With an audio book, all you get is someone’s voice droning into your ear. It might only be a personal thing, but it seems to me that part of what makes reading magical is that it’s a deeply personal experience. For me, one of the crucial aspects of this is having my own voice doing the internal narration which obviously you don’t get with an audio book. Somehow the whole thing feels like a passive activity. I’m just sitting there with headphones in my ear listening to someone blabber on instead of the active process of reading words on a page and deciphering them. Maybe it’s just me, but this seems like a distortion of the whole process. Now being someone who is engaged in the dark arts of the law, let me play the devil’s advocate here and challenge my own argument. One could argue that there isn’t that much of a difference between a book and the Kindle- after all books are designed and packaged just as the Kindle is. It might undermine the romanticized view we have of books if we think critically of the craft that goes into the creation process once the author has handed in his final manuscript. A Kindle enthusiast might ask- is there any intrinsic value in a book being in paper form that makes it somehow superior to the Kindle its current form? Am I perhaps just engaging in literary snobbery? One could also argue that my love for books in their conventional form was some sort of historical accident- after all, what would have happened if the Kindle had been my first reading experience? Imagine a parallel world in which the Kindle had been developed first and the book afterwards. Perhaps in that parallel world, I would consider the idea of reading a book quite odd. My childhood memories of book textures and smells and drawings would have been replaced with the feeling of a smooth metallic object in my hand. Or indeed, the sound of another person’s voice via the Audiobook. Perhaps I would have looked back on my reading experience with almost the same kind of nostalgia and today I would find both alternatives perfectly normal. Somehow I doubt it. I think my childhood and my present as well, would have been all the poorer for it. I think the Kindle ‘condenses’ the reading experience in a way books did not do and presents a sort of abbreviated version of the whole process. It tries to iron out the ‘inconveniences’ and glamorize the whole process. It’s entirely possible that in the future my great-grandchildren will all have Kindles and books will be like antiques. I don’t know about you, but I think that would be a very sad thing. minega_isibo@yahoo.co.uk