February is coming to a close now and I am looking at my coffee table and on it are sat a few books and my Amazon Kindle.
This has got me thinking about where we are going with ebooks and I began to feel a little afraid that in ten years the ebook will have taken over. I got my Kindle from my parents at Christmas 2011 and when I first opened it the first thought I am sad to say was not "wow, this is a great present!!!", but was, I am ashamed to say "do you really know me? Why not get me Star Wars on Blu Ray???".
The thing was that my dad and I had bought my mother one for her birthday as they were going somewhere in Africa and it was easier than my mum having to take a number of books with her and filling their suitcase. I set it up for her and was impressed by it and thought that it was easy to read the text for great lengths of time in comparison to a normal computer screen that makes my eyes hurt after a time.
The thing for me though is that whilst I think of it as useful when travelling or you are on the go as it were if I am going to be sat on my sofa at home with a cup of peppermint tea and a biscuit I would much rather have a physical book.
I strongly believe that the written word is one of mankind's greatest inventions (or a discovery perhaps?) as it allows us to express ourselves in a way that we cannot sometimes express when talking and we can record things which led to the great Herodotus writing his Histories and creating the art from which his book is named.
Anyway, I'm going off topic there.
I thought that I should get a book on my Kindle to try it out and so I bought World War 2.1 by John Birmingham as I had always wanted to give alternative history a try but had never seen the book in a shop and I was too impatient to wait for delivery. 20 seconds later I had the book on my Kindle and started to read. It was a great story and I was then able to easily buy the next two in the series and apart from the fact that it doesn't give me page numbers but instead percent which annoys me as that doesn't always change every page as the percent hasn't changed I was sold.
Until I went to SFX3 in Wales....
I went there and I was determined to meet Jonathan Green, the author of the Pax Britannica novels. I met him and had a brilliant chat with him and got all of my books signed. Behind him was a sign that said that you could get all of the Abaddon books for £22 and they would put them on your Kindle there and then (I had mine in my bag). This is when it hit me. In ten years, if I look at my Kindle, will I think when I look at the book that I met the author/s?
No.
I left SFX with nearly a hundred pounds of books (there were many deals) some of which have not been published yet. Most of the books are from Angry Robot Publishers and all but one are signed. I even bought some books that I had no interest in just because I had nice chats (or a few pints) with the author on the day or the night before. I cannot guarantee that I will always remember the conversations that I had with the likes of the wonderful Guy Haley, Ian Whates, Jonathan Green, Dan Abnett and David Tallerman, but the second I open their books and read what they have written, my imagination will be transported back to when I spoke to them and the enjoyment that I had.
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| Jonathan Green and Guy Haley |
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| David Tallerman |
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| Ian Whates |
It is for this reason that I always write a message in the front of any book I give as a gift so that that person will always remember the reason that I got them the book, and in years to come if the book passes to a new owner for any reason then the new owner will get a feeling, no matter how small, of what the book had meant in the past.
Whilst I might be a science fiction fan, I do not want to walk into a library in the future for it just to be banks of data servers with digital books in, even if that makes information even easier to get a hold of. I know that it seems a bit simple of me to say that I don't like my Kindle because I cannot be emotionally invested in it the way I can be with a real physical book, but I don't think I will change on this. I realise that at the age of 24 it is difficult to move round my flat because of the 700+ books on the shelves (which will only get worse over time I imagine) and that my training as a classicist might mean I prefer old things to new things sometimes, but sometimes maybe change is bad. whilst I prefer mp3 and have been a supporter of them whilst everyone else was investing in mini disks because they saved space (I still cannot believe that my first mp3 player was from Sony, the size of a lighter and over £200), books are different.
Maybe I should start asking authors to sign my Kindle? But then eventually the Kindle will improve more or a different make will replace it and then it will become like my old mp3 player, stuffed in a drawer somewhere because my iPhone is better for the time being. Books will never become outdated, and they can represent moments in our lives and bring them back to us in a way no ebook could ever manage.
Please let me know if your views on this, as whilst it may seem like I have drawn my line in the sand, I am still conflicted over this issue.
Thank you
John
All photos taken by me :-)
Yeah, pretty good.
ReplyDeleteNot as long as you were expecting, eh? You said you thought I may have considered it, and I had - to the tune of more than this comment box could cope with! So, I popped it on my blog. Here you go:
http://longhairstu.blogspot.com/2012/02/paper-version-not-available.html
Hope you enjoy reading that as much as I enjoyed reading yours.
Greetings,
ReplyDeleteLong time no see mate! Hope life is treating you in a relatively decent way, or at least better than when you started the blog.
I completely agree with you upon the need to hold onto the past as physical objects are so much more important to myself as they are to you. Although I do have a little bit of a different situation to yourself.
I'm still teaching in South Korea and my contract is up in either two months or eight months (chatting with my boss this week about it). So all of my books (not 700, but they do weight about 50kgs) will have to be stored or shipped to my new place when I find another job out here.
To combat some of this bloat I got an iPad 2 after my 1st gen iPod Touch croaked. It's easy to read from and once you get over the fact that it is a fruit-based product and the limitations because of that fact it's not bad. The thing was I decided that I needed to go back several hundred years in a different way to hold onto something that is being lost. I went to an art store in Seoul and I got myself some wooden handles, calligraphy nibs and coloured inks.
I'm not using them everyday, but I do have to re-decorate my classroom and I'm writing Shakespeare quotes with them. My co-teachers and boss are freaked out by this. My kids are aware that I can do things like this, but they haven't seen me do it while they are watching. It's quite fun to be archaic at times.
Regards,
Christian
Hi Christian, its great to hear from you. Your timing is very odd as I was just putting that pic that I took of you at the ball on my memory board in my room and then I saw an email saying you had made a comment.
ReplyDeleteYou'll have to take a snap of your handiwork and send it to me as I would love to see it, with our qualifications you know I'm a fan of good handwriting.
Its good to see that even with the distraction of technology that you keep a strong link to the past. I do wonder though that are we like this because of our degree's or were we already like this which is what drew us to them?
In answer to the first bit of your comment, its safe to say that the soundtrack of my life has skipped to a new track, and I couldnt be happier right now. Well, a more fulfilling job would help, but my many hobbies keep me very happy and I really enjoy writing on my blog.
Have you heard about your contract yet? How are things for you other than what you've mentioned above?
All the best
John