There are a growing number of people who seem to enjoy nothing more than coming out of the woodwork every so often to bemoan the death of the printed word and, in particular, the death of the book; that humble collection of bound pages that the majority of us get most of our knowledge from.
They like nothing better than to bemoan the rise of the machines and the grip they have on the leisure habits of the youth of today, who would rather sit in front of a screen than open up a Penguin paperback. So I was interested to find out what they made of the incredible popularity of the recently mass marketed range of eBooks and eBook readers.
initially thought they’d welcome the new devices like the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindler with open arms; electronic, hand held devices that are designed to get the iPod generation reading again are surely what they have been crying out for. But after surfing the net and reading a few magazine articles and columns I found I was completely off the mark.
It seems that for some people the very idea of reading from a screen, even if it has been designed to mimic a page from a book in every way possible, is not just wrong it’s one step further on the road to global illiteracy.
Even before the electronic devices were available to buy in shops people were predicting they would last about as long as the Sinclair C5 and have as much impact as the millennium bug. I found lists of reasons they gave as to why reading from a lightweight, compact, durable device that enabled you to carry thousands of books around with you all at once would not work. The reasons ranged from the banal but understandable; real books don’t need batteries and don’t need to be plugged in, to the downright daft; you can use real books to roll cigarettes on.
I’m guessing that the guy who liked to roll cigarettes on his books, as opposed to reading them, didn’t rush out and buy a Sony Reader. In stark contrast though, I couldn’t find a bad comment from anyone who had bought one, unless you count the person who dropped hers in the bath and found that sticking it on the radiator overnight may have dried it out but didn’t bring it back to life.
This week Amazon launches its own version of the eBook reader, the Kindler. It has received the same stuffy response from the same technophobes, who will probably only be happy when we are reading the latest Nick Hornby on parchment or, better still, stone tablets. What I found most interesting while looking into the whole affair though, was the fact that none of them mentioned that Waterstones have sold 30,000 Sony Readers since September and similar devices are proving just as popular. It seems that some people just can’t stand the sight of no blood.
I say if there are 30,000 more people reading today than there were six months ago then the world is a better place and it’s time to put the whole silly argument to bed. Time to turn the page, or should that be press the button, and move on.
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I was disappointed that the Amazon Kindle automatically kips down after five min because if you are utilising the Amazon Kindle for reading or music, it times out on you while you are still “working” on a page