Life of a bibliophile in these times of kindle

Picture: Wikimedia Commons
Collection of National Media Museum

Listen carefully and you can hear the eternal dirges being chanted by the votaries of e-books and kindle. They sound like the mysterious incantations of a shaman. In their apocalyptic imaginative world with bio-engineered post-humans and cyborgs, will the good old books we grew up with become the essential anachronistic disturbances like bullock-carts lumbering past a modern highway of motor cars? 

Do I sound like a 21st century Luddite professing a dinosaur-era scenario, who refuses to see the revolution on the digitization wall? Agreed that Kindle and e-books are here to stay. Ease of download, fast reading, plethora of good deals and free books, ease of carrying… Kindle lovers will bombard you with the many juicy side of that sleek gadget. Or e-books for that matter.  

But can an e-book or kindle give us the pleasure of reading from the good old book? 

Do you want to deny your nostrils the essential aroma of a farm-fresh book that you just bought from the bookstore down the lane, the freshness lasting for so many days making you the proud owner and keeper forever? A worthy possession you want to bequeath to your progeny? 

Do you want to deny yourself the atavistic aroma of that ancient-looking old book with frayed edges and stained pages you just bought from the pavement? The pleasure of running your fingers over the pages is ethereal; the old-world aroma emanating from the pages makes you travel on a psychedelic trip on a time-machine: the fact that it has travelled places, passed down from one hand to the other must make your soul vault in ecstasy. 

Now some recent hard truths, from around the world, which should make any bibliophile happy.

World over, sales of traditional books, despite the deluge of e-books and kindle, are only going up.

And sometime back, Britain's largest book chain, Waterstones, was planning to scrap sales of Kindles because there were not many buyers. And it is a trend. A growing army of readers still prefer the old-fashioned experience of reading words printed on a page to reading from e-reader or kindle. 

Another study found that readers using a Kindle were "significantly worse than traditional book readers” when it comes to recalling events that occurred in a mystery short story. The kindle readers scored poorly on various matrixes like the plot reconstruction measure, narrative coherence, etc.

Now, do you still want your entire rows of books in your living room (bought, borrowed, stolen, grandpa-bequeathed, girlfriend-presented, concubine-gifted, office Christmas Santa-gifted…) to be replaced by that drab sleek gadget? No bibliophile will say yes to this question, will you?

Now, will you pass me my old book, please?

(First published here: http://gatewaylitfest.com/life-of-a-bibliophile-in-these-times-of-kindle/)