We put the Sony eBook reader up for sale this week on eBay. It brings to an end a year long experiment; or at least a year of trying it out. During that year we both continued to pick up paper books, and invariably did so out of preference.
There’s just something about a paper book - although saying that, it may be no more than decades of social conditioning, or childhood memories that future generations will not have. The smell, touch, and simplicity of a paper book is bound tightly to the reading experience for me.
Although I sit at a computer for innumerable hours each day, reading blogs, writing, and otherwise communicating with either the computer itself, or friends and colleagues, there is a difference between that, and sitting down to read.
Last week I momentarily looked at the new (cheaper) Kindle. I even started to work out how I could squirrel the money away to get one. Finally common sense arrived on my shoulder and whispered everything I already knew into my left ear… it’s just another gadget. I’ll feel odd sitting in a coffee shop with it. I’ll be scared of damaging it. It will go flat. I’ll be scared of it being stolen.
Books, armchairs, dusty book shops, cafs and coffee somehow go hand in hand. They fit together nicely in my head, and forge a persuasive situation to want to find myself in. An electronic gadget has no place in that world…