Aren’t afternoon naps wonderful things! I’m not quite sure how I ended up having one, but somewhere between just resting my eyes for a moment and waking up again that appears to be precisely what happened. That, or some inexplicable time slip during which something fabulously refreshing occurred.
Either way I find myself still in bed with a happily snoring cat snuggled in tight against my lap and absolutely no prayer of moving for the foreseeable future.
That’s okay, because you know what I have? I have an unlimited personal library right here at my fingertips. Oh yes indeedy I do! I have an iPad and a Kindle app, and the literary world is my oyster.
Which feels like something I ought to publicly admit to taking great pleasure in after all my stubborn resistance to the idea of virtual books.
It’s actually Steven Gould I have to thank for my unexpected conversion. He had the marvellous idea of asking Twitter friends to proofread a newly scanned digital conversion of one of his books. At the time I had my old netbook, and it wasn’t the most intuitive of experiences, but it was far more accessible than I’d expected.
The real jumping point, however, was when he extraordinarily kindly gave me an advance copy of his latest book, 7th SIGMA. Which is an absolute joy to read, by the way, and something I urge you to do at your earliest convenience!
This time I had my iPad. I also had a desperately sad funeral to attend, entailing a flight during which I really needed to take my mind off the whole heartbreaking affair if I had the slightest hope of being strong enough to be of comfort to those most closely affected.
So it was that I found myself sitting in an airport, with an iPad, reading a book. Such a simple moment but, daft as it sounds, it really was a revelation! For all my insistence that nothing in the world could possibly compare to reading a “proper” book (that is, one made of mulched up trees), it transpired something which fitted as many books as I could possibly wish to carry all neat and TARDIS-like in my handbag is actually pretty damn magnificent! It even allowed me to adjust page and font colour, and adjust the font size to suit my slightly weak, but not enough for reading glasses, eyesight.
Skip forward a couple of months and, without having to disturb the cat or do any precarious book-attaining lean from bed, I just abandoned A Dance with Dragons in favour of a fascinating book on positive psychology which I started reading in the wee small hours last night without any need to disturb my partner by putting on the light. It’s not a book I would have even found, let alone bought, in paper form.
Later, I shall commit the ultimate sacrilege by deciding which of my paperbacks I plan on donating to charity before our imminent house move because, frankly, they’re just so much clutter to cart along with us and, if I want to read them again, I’ll pick up a digital copy.
Which isn’t to say I don’t still have a deep and abiding affection for “proper” books: I shall also be deciding which of my most treasured paper and hardback books to keep, and in a funny kind of way they’re all the more precious to me because they’re something special enough to want in a more tangible form.
But I do feel I owe Kindle a very public apology for all my grumbling resistance to the sheer magic they, and apps like them, have brought into the world. Also to Steven Gould for being the unwitting cause of this happy discovery – thank you!
I’m still a little grumbly about them but I have got a couple of books on my iPad. Besides the sweet scent of a new book, it’s pricing that’s most off putting. It still seems to be so much cheaper to buy a physical book than digital which makes no sense at all!
I’m sure I’ll be swayed soon enough though and probably have a collection of physical and digital like I do with games
Pricing I will totally grant you is still a big reservation I have. It’s not just the fact you’re paying the same price (sometimes more!) for digital copy as you’d expect to pay for something more tangible, but this pricing structure totally ignores the fact that a physical book can be lent, shared, passed on, handed down… sometimes multiple times. That, more than anything else (for me the loss of sensory experience is offset far more than expected by sheer convenience), profoundly offends me.
I entirely agree!