I resisted ebooks for a long time. I'm old school and dismissed the kindle as a fad. Libraries are time honoured traditions where you discover the world of books, you wander the aisles and carry your treasures home with you. You buy your favourite books and read them again and again and again. It's my dream to have a lovely collection of beautiful volumes of classics. I love the smell and feel of books, turning pages and seeing how many more pages until the next chapter. It's delicious reading the first page and you savour the last few pages, feeling like you are bidding farewell to a good friend who you will no longer spend as much time with.
However, I have to bow to practicalities and realise that technology has come a long way. The kindle is like a jukebox of your favourite songs and you can play whichever you so fancy at any point in time.
It achieves my dream of owning a library, it's just that it is not quite as I envisaged - it's a virtual library. What I love is that you can read pdfs and access all the free ebooks on gutenberg. I miss the weight of a book and it can never be comparable to the experience of holding a real book. But it does make sense when you are on the tube, waiting for the bus or a friend, or going on holiday.
I wonder what Shakespeare, Dickens and Woolf would have thought about these contraptions. As avid readers, would they have embraced the kindle and realised the potential of an increasing market of readers, that books continue to vie for the hearts of today's busy person who may often rather reality television, a dark cinema or nightclub, or a pint at the pub, to being curled up and hearing a great story?
The kindle is good for readers and writers. And you know what? Libraries have ebooks you can borrow now too!
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