Ebooks: the future in the palm of your hand?
I love books. That will hardly come as a surprise to any of you but I thought I’d admit it, nevertheless. My love of books isn’t just restricted to reading them. I love buying them, collecting them, having them in my house… and there are thousands of them, literally, or should that be literary?
Even if I never buy another book in my life, I know that I will never get round to reading all of the books I own just now. I’m not getting any younger, after all. But the inexorable march of time is only part of the problem. I look at some of the books I have and wonder what on earth possessed me to buy them in the first place? My problem is that I can’t pass a bookshop without going in, and once inside, I feel it’s rude not to buy something.
Now, I’m about to embrace the book-reading technology of the twenty-first century and buy a Kindle. I have resisted ebooks for as long as I could; I have dismissed them and denigrated them, but they are the future… or at least, an important part of it.
It has been a long journey for me to get to this point. As I admitted already, I love books – to have, to hold, to own, to read. That won’t change, but having spoken to a couple of fellow bibliophiles who were previously ebook sceptics but are now fully-fledged converts. I suspect, or fear, I am set to follow suit.
It’s becoming an increasingly popular format and last year more ebooks than paperbacks were sold in the United States. That trend that is set to continue. My new novel, The Hunted, will be available in this format, while I know the publishers of my first novel, Saints and Sinners, are set to do so the same thing with that book.
The subject is also fresh in my mind, having read last week that the man acknowledged as the creator of ebooks died. Michael Hart was a student in Illinois back in 1971 when he started Project Gutenberg, which aimed to copy tens of thousands of books into electronic form and distribute them for free. His idea might have taken almost 40 years to become globally accepted, and it’s not a universally free concept, but it is still a remarkable one. And Project Gutenberg apparently now has 36,000 books, in 60 different languages, all in ebook format and available for free.
If I have one fear, and I hesitate before saying it in case word gets back to my house, is that buying a Kindle could put my book collection under threat. The question I know that is sure to be asked is, ‘If all those books can fit in the palm of your hand, then why should they take up so much space in the house?’ But I’m not giving them up. Not a single one! To borrow an infamous quote from the late, gun-loving actor, Charlton Heston, ‘From my cold dead hands….’
Having said all that, I did stumble upon details of the forthcoming Guardian and Observer Book Swap, which encourages people to give away their books, or at least one of them. The idea is to pick a book you like, put a special sticker on it that the newspapers supply on which you explain why you like the book, and then leave it somewhere that it can be found. It’s a good idea, although after having initially thought of a favourite book to give away, I then began to come up with reasons not to, and instead began to think of alternative candidates; I’m sure there’s a Jeffrey Archer book in the house somewhere that my mum gave me as a Christmas present many years ago!
Here’s the link if you’re interested in taking part. BOOK SWAP
author@paulcuddihy.com or follow me on Twitter @PaulTheHunted
