Essay

A happy coexistence

By Benjamin Woodward

The relationship between me and electronics is one of mutual distrust. I don't love gadgets, and gadgets don't love me, and they have an alarming tendency to break down when I use them. So it's not surprising that I scoffed when I heard of e-readers. Why did I need an e-reader? What could replace or better the experience of reading a book?

Reading books is, of course, about reading words on a page, but there's more to the reading experience than that. Reading books is about going into a bookshop, seeing the books lined waiting on the shelves, and encountering the unexpected. It's about the physical beauty of the book itself: the cover, the texture of the paper, the weight of the book in your hand, the wrinkles in the spine, the dog-eared pages and the wear and tear. It's a record of where you read it and what was happening when you read it: the chocolate brownie stain on page 14, the bloody smear of a squashed mosquito from your trip to Thailand on page 158, the now incomprehensible "note to self'' on page 287, the wavy paper from when you dropped it in the bath, the hastily scrawled phone number on the inside back cover. You lose that intimacy with an e-reader, which seems cold and impersonal by comparison, and which makes the reading experience more ephemeral.

And yet, here I am, now, the owner of an e-reader, and rather begrudgingly I like it.

Practicality was the main draw. I move about a great deal, and praising books is all very fine and noble until you have to cart a ton of them around. But once I started using the e-reader, I was pleasantly surprised. It was easy to use, and easy on the eye. I could adjust the size of the script, which was a great boon as publishers now often economize with microscopic fonts. Also, classics are cheap, and I'm spending less because I buy one book at a time.

So am I a convert? Not entirely. You can't share e-books. Some e-readers come with too many distracting extras. Publishing spats can limit book selection, and there is the constant fear that my e-reader will break or run out of batteries or, heaven forbid, be outmoded. I lament, too, having to forgo life's chief pleasure of reading in a bath on a cold, rainy morning. Happily it's not an either/or situation, and I'm now used to mixing books and e-books.

The e-book may be the future of reading, but it won't ever replace the book. It's comforting that in this day and age, when every few weeks throws up some new fancy device to make our lives both easier and more complicated, that the book, in all its compactness, its portability, its durability and its reliability, remains the most perfect piece of technology in itself.

Shukan ST: September 3, 2010

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