Some weeks ago I read an article by one Joe Queenan titled ‘My 6,128 Favorite Books‘. I mostly enjoyed the article – it’s lovely to read about someone with reading habits as eccentric as my own (he once tried to spend a year only reading books he thought he’d hate, I once tried to read the school library alphabetically, both goals predictably ill-fated) – but the section I’ve been thinking about since is this:
Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who have clutter issues, or who don’t want other people to see that they are reading books about parallel universes where nine-eyed sea serpents and blind marsupials join forces with deaf Valkyries to rescue high-strung albino virgins from the clutches of hermaphrodite centaurs, but they are useless for people engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on. Books that make us believe, for however short a time, that we shall all live happily ever after. [emphasis mine]
I disagree.
I think it’s fair to say I’m ‘engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books’, and you may not need any more evidence than my 200 books project, but in case you do:
- I taught myself to read while walking shortly after I learned to read, and always have a book in my pocket – sorry Mum, I know I gave you palpitations worrying I’d get run over
- Until I was 20 I never willingly gave away or sold or traded a book – even ones belonging to my brother which I didn’t like
- I still spend more money and far more time on buying and reading books than on any other hobby – yes my book stash is bigger than my yarn stash
So, credentials established, here’s my problem: I love ebooks. I love ebooks more than paper books, and I wish I could magically convert all my paper books into ebooks.
When my parents bought me a Kindle, it seemed to them like an obvious gift for the reasons above. At the time, K and I were sharing a flat and moving regularly, so anything which stemmed the weight of books to be boxed and carried should have been welcome.
I was skeptical. I loved books, books with covers and editions and age. Books with smells, mostly pleasant. Books on my shelf, showing visitors my erudition, books on the bedside table ripe with possibilities.
And yet, the books I have in paper form, the books I’ve loved over the years, which I’ve kept and carried, stored safe from water, fire and small children, I rarely read. Because I can only carry one around at a time. Because they’re fragile from age and wear. Because they’re usually in a different country or town or in a box in an attic or lost or leant. Because I had to give some of them away, or we’d be drowning in books, so that I know I have had copies of Lolita, The Satanic Verses and several other Big Read books but given them away, unread, because there’s only so much space for paper.
Ebooks are a salvation. I can access every single ebook I’ve every bought or been given from anywhere in the world. If my Kindle gets lost or stolen or smashed I can get a new one, use a smartphone or a laptop and the books are still there, unchanged.
I no longer have to cull my collection and cull again when we move. Books I didn’t like are as weightless as perennial favourites.
It’s all about access
Growing up as an English-language reader in Switzerland, finding books was mostly luck. Luckily, my parents had a good collection, and let me roam it at will. Luckily, they were willing to volunteer at the American Library (‘as we’re there every week’), to give me money for book sales at school, to spend precious home-country time trawling through bookshops.
But with all this wealth, there were things I missed: the second book in the What Katy Did series, the final one in the Emily Climbs series, the information that Diana Wynne Jones wrote more than three books, that Connie Willis wrote at all. Any series, however short, was liable to have holes in, even in the library. School stories, like Mallory Towers, were particularly frustrating as they’re so linear. The Trebizon series was, as far as I was concerned, only one book.
A credit card of my own and the rise of the big, online book sellers alleviated the problem but raised their own frustrations: high postage costs, treks to the Royal Mail depot and the usual risks of buying a pig in a poke.
Now, I can be in Switzerland (as I am), remember a book I read once and liked, immediately download a sample (yes, I still like it) and then blow all my mad money reading the whole 10-book series in less than a month.
It’s bliss.
So while I can’t touch or smell an ebook, while part of me misses displaying my collection (hence the blog, the G+ stream), my ebooks are still ‘books that [I] can depend on. Books that make [me] believe, for however short a time, that we shall all live happily ever after.’
And that’s what makes them books.
Well said. I couldn’t agree more.
Thanks
I completely agree. I’m constantly having to cull our bookshelves and it’s heartbreaking, but I just store as many as I need on my Kindle and always have them at my fingertips.
I think that’s the worst of paper books – and then wanting to reread something, or check something later. My parents were willing to keep a lot of my childhood favourites, but don’t imagine I’d be as lenient with my own children.
This Christmas when we visited my parents, they brought out eight big boxes of books and said I had to choose what I was taking with my back to Bath, and the rest would go to charity shops. I was actually impressed with how ruthless I was! Ideally I’d have a library and keep everything unless I hated it, but there’s never going to be the room.
(for his own books, my Dad built a large shed in the garden – it’s insulated, heated etc. He has thousands of books in there, but no room for my childhood books as well)
Oh man, I’d hate that. Well done for being ruthless! I do try to get rid of books I’ve forgotten or didn’t like, because one day I ought to be grown up enough to have all my stuff in my own place, but there’s still a couple big book shelves full. And one of the books is all about peoples’ personal libraries — such lovely pictures.
Broadly speaking, I agree completely! The only thing is, my ideal world would involve me having an ereader, but everybody else having paper books.
I had exactly the same access problems as you did growing up. I’m convinced that I’m an incredibly avid rereader, just because it was either that or not read at all. As an adult with money, access to a credit card and unlimited internet etc, an ereader really is the thing I’ve been waiting for all my life without knowing it. I now don’t have to spend the night before a journey frantically reading the last two chapters of some massive brick of a book because otherwise it has to come along, for example. This one unit where all books are kept is wonderful for me now, but it makes it hard to browse somebody else’s collection. Generally speaking, you don’t really get to do that anyway, but there is one situation in which it does happen.
Growing up, things are quite different. The way I met new books was usually by trawling through my parents’ books, or my grandparents’. Many books came from the school dumping ground (La Chat had an excellent one for example!) where old library books and books people had to read for school came to die. I’m convinced that I would not have met quite so many different kinds of books if I hadn’t ransacked other people’s stuff for it.
Maybe I’m seeing a problem where none exists, because in the future we will be able to share more easily what we’ve got on our own ereaders. At the moment, this seems to be actively discouraged for obvious reasons by anybody making ebooks. I do think though that it’s incredibly important in the formation of your own reading tastes to be able to do this kind of browsing of other people’s books.
And I still love paper books. I don’t see why I can’t love both ebooks and the old-fashioned kind at the same time. There is something about buying yourself the newest, brightly coloured Terry Pratchett, smelling of wonderfulness and terrypratchettness, and physically turning to the first page that ebooks haven’t really replaced. However, anybody who’s had an ereader from an early age will probably associate these feelings with flicking to the first page.
lol – I can see why you’d want other people to have paper books. I really want to be able to lend people books off my ereader and share the fabulousness, or just hand something on and say ‘it’s crap, but you have to read it!’ I do think that places like blogs, Facebook and G+ are good ways to rave about books you’ve read, or just show off that you finished Great Expectations. And if it’s already written down, it saves me having to remember the title of that book I liked the sound of that so-and-so mentioned that time in the pub, now who was it?
I imagine if I had kids that they’d have access to all my ebooks on their ereader (K already does, although I might want certain filters in place, like high or hard to access shelves in the library for young children) and I expect there’ll still be some kind of school library. But I would like them to branch out, too, and get used to being adventurous readers, and that’s not so easy when books are scarce.
I don’t think everyone has to choose between ebooks and paper books – I guess I was surprised by how hard I fell for the new tech. I’m usually more of a Luddite, and my self-image has taken a knock!
Here speaks another Ecolint alumnus – but a Grande Boissière one…
Oh, I didn’t know that, Mel! What a fun coincidence – I also went to Chat, which is how I know (the other) M.
Oooh yes.
My mom still laughs and says I would wake up reading and she’d find me with one leg in my jeans, reading, while the mad morning rush was on and I was supposed to be at the bus stop in 30 seconds… I had long periods of getting 3 books out of the (excellent) school library each day and returning them the next day for another 3.
And now I still buy books but my surroundings are less cluttered thanks to the Kindle app on my ipad/iphone – means I still read everywhere (much to many people’s amazement – the Swiss aren’t very big readers!) and anywhere. For me, both are valid. I’m just sorry I can’t lend Kindle books – it means I can’t force them on anyone LOL!!