2011 saw the sale of e-books hit new highs. A bibliophile writes about why she has become a convert to e-books
You could call it an e-piphany. The first time I became aware of e-books I was sitting by the poolside of a tropical resort. A bronzed man, a European gentleman of indeterminate age was lounging by the side of the sparkling blue waters, a slim tablet in his hand, turning the silver surface of his iPad with a lazy flicking motion of his index finger. How perfect it seemed to have the world’s literature at his fingertips. Never mind that he might have been engrossed in Adventures of a Brothel Keeper, or How to Cure Insomnia.
At that moment, a snake, a green and yellow-bellied tree snake, fell off the palm tree between us and landed with a thwack on the sun-warmed stones. It lay for an instant stunned by the fall, a coil of rope in an S-shape. Then moving briskly with a slither and a shake, it stumbled out of sight in the nearby shrubbery.
We both looked up, the man and I. “A serpent in paradise?” he asked and went back to his e-book. I on the other hand was entranced. The snake and the e-book had cast a spell. Both had an economy of style and movement.
It has to be said at once that I am neither a sucker for things that crawl and creep or of the seductions of electronic ephemera. Till that moment, I was a cardholding aficionado of at least eight different libraries, trawling them for enlightenment from obscure tracts on Theosophy to heavyminded German and Russian literature, in translation of course, aside from variants on English and French. If at all I was fond of crawling it was through the stacks of old books on pavements that for the book hunter has all the fascination of gold diggers standing in muddy waters panning their sieves in the hope of finding that elusive dust. Of late, however, a certain disenchantment had set in with the guardians and purveyors of the printed word. It must be an age related complaint. Dedicated librarians who knew their Vargas Llosa from their Vermicelli Uppuma are now as defunct as the friendly family doctor or the inspired apothecary who could hand over a tincture made to your prescription. They have been replaced by electronic zombies who can only text and scroll down their replies while frowning at their screens after you have made your request, for title, publisher’s name and author identity. One need not even get into the nouveau bookshops with their miles and miles of fancy-packaged merchandise — they are no longer called books — because they are serviced by mechanical robots, who don’t even need to read, let alone engage with the requests of customers who might be looking for some material, a book, perhaps, that is not a best-seller.
Can one ever forget the owners of those old-fashioned bookshops, the like of which was immortalised in Helen Hanff’s spirited memoir, 84 Charing Cross: of a 20-year-old relationship with the owner of a London bookshop, who sustained her with a rich trove of literature while she fed him from her American end with food parcels during a lean period in England?
From this vantage point, it was just another step into the world of e-books. The acquisition of the tablet, a little
black book, there are of course several variations on the theme was the next step. I needed the guidance of experts in the e-world to guide me through the complexities of acquiring ‘apps’ that I still know nothing about.
From the very first, the joy of being able to download the latest issues of various literary and non-literary magazines was quite as rivetting as discovering the animated versions of children’s literature. A Pinocchio for instance whose nose gets longer and longer as he tells fibs or the outrageous antics of Dr Seuss’s rhyming excesses made real on the screen proved to be addictive.
It’s not like reading from the page. It’s not like watching a DVD or a film on the screen, but a hybrid of both that allows you the luxury of choosing what you want, or need and making it almost instantly available. While preparing for a trip to Burma for instance, I came across some accounts of Burma written in the late 19th century by earlier travellers that at one time would only have been available to me if I had a chance to visit the British Library. They have digitalized their rare books and these are available to the browser for a nominal fee. So, you get to ‘hire’ these books online for a specific period of time. Not only does it mean that the rare books do not get physically handled and perhaps mistreated, it means that they are available to readers all across the world at the touch of an I-pad.
There’s also the thrill, childish as it may seem, of being the first to get a title or an author. The immediacy of acquisition of a book means that there’s no need to wait in line for the latest obscure South American poet or novelist, or even as used to be the case for the last Harry Potter. For those who like to moan that they like a dormant position, or read upside down in the back of trucks in the moonlight, the tablet is just as flexible. You can highlight pages, have words explained to you, bookmark them so that the text will leap to the place that you left off, or tell you how many more pages you have to go till the end.
In short, you can have all the fun you ever want to with an e-book as you had with your paperbacked ones, except maybe have your dog chew off the last page and leave you hankering for the end.
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