Kate Solomon

When e-readers first became a thing, they were pretty easy to write off as a needless technological gimmick that people would grow to regret buying, like 3D TVs. But, in the manner of a particularly robust terrier, they’ve refused to relinquish their grip on the old sock that is popular culture.

2010 was (arguably) the year that the e-reader finally took off and now Amazon is forever bleating that it’s sold a zillion e-books and Mr Unknown Author has made his first million by self-publishing one. Although history has proved time and time again that vast groups of people can be wrong about stuff (Nazi-ism? Titanic deserving 11 Oscars? The whole world-being-flat thing?), when it gets to the point when some other would-be novelist is making millions instead of me, it’s time to check it out.

And so, having been a staunch and fairly vocal resister of the electronic reading revolution for several years, I went to Amazon cap in hand and asked to borrow a Kindle. It very kindly agreed, and so “my” Kindle has accompanied me everywhere for the last few weeks.

My previous position was this: e-readers are technology for the sake of it. There can be no better reading experience than of print on paper. Not even if you paid a seventy-three-year-old cave-dwelling monk to engrave the entire text of the Harry Potter books onto slabs of gold which come complete with cup holder, masseuse and three-storey town house in Manhattan could you have a better time reading it than if you just picked up the paper and ink books.

“But hey!” cried the technology gods. “You can’t plug a book in and charge it up every night! We can’t sell you a book that you’ll need to replace with the same book in a year’s time! You can’t carry eight hundred books at once! You can’t not read a book in direct sunlight! You don’t need a warranty or extra personal contents insurance for a book! Unless it’s super old and rare, that is! How can you people live like this?”

The outlandish success of the iPod didn’t help – if Apple can do it for music, someone really ought to do it for books, right?

Well, they may – may – be on to something. I’ll admit that I haven’t hated using the Kindle.

The print is not too offensive to the eye, rendered as it is in e-ink rather than on a brash LED-lit screen that you might use on an iPad. And yes, using an e-reader on a packed tube carriage is far more convenient than wielding The Pale King at my fellow commuters, trying out a million innovative and completely unsuccessful ways of turning a page without moving either of my arms.

The easy reading experience meant I raced through a good few books; Capote’s In Cold Blood which was, obviously, excellent, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen which reminded me, inexplicably, of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Tina Fey’s not-as-good-as-I’d-hoped Bossy Pants before I stalled on War and Peace – well, I thought I ought to read something massive to make the most of it. At the time of writing, I’m 6% of the way through. It’s only ok so far.

Having been prepared to loathe and resent the e-reader, I was surprised at just how much I didn’t hate it. In fact, I genuinely liked using the Kindle.

But I’ll tell you what; after the novelty of having a new toy wore off, I really missed books. If you’re anything like me, you get a bit excited about turning the page of a book, physically preparing the action when you’re still paragraphs away from go time. When all you have to do is press a button to turn the page, it can result in quite a few premature page-turning scenarios, which then leads to quite a few lost places and frustrated guesses at how many pages 42% of the way through the book equates to so you can use the Go To function.

There’s a reason why books have survived hundreds of years of industrial and technological progress; it’s because they’re brilliant. There’s nothing quite like a book – the comfortable familiarity of an old worn-out favourite and the sheer potential and new-book smell of a just-purchased one. Not to mention the beautiful cover art and painstakingly perfect typesetting that some books come with.

Each e-book I tried came with the same drab fonts and a tiny black-and-white thumbnail of the cover art offering no visual excitement whatsoever. Real books can be big, little, square, rectangular, pristine, misshapen, tea-stained, annotated, dog-eared and always truly yours. Any e-book could pretty much belong to anybody.

Last year a few of my late gran’s books passed into my ownership, with her handwriting, her notes and the knowledge that these well-thumbed pages had been made so by my much-loved grandmother’s thumbs. I’m sure my great-grandchildren (optimistic) will be thrilled to have my Amazon account passed down to them in my will, complete with the one passage I highlighted.

E-books are too expensive as well* – partly because we’re charged VAT on e-books in the UK but not on real ones. There’s no way this will change, unless it’s a change that sees VAT applied to physical tomes as well and that’s not really what I had in mind. But it’s also psychological; I’ve paid £100 for this gadget, but every time I actually want to use it, I’m shelling out another eight quid for something that I can’t even touch and hold and put on my shelf to look cool and allow others to admire my impeccable literary taste (ignore that copy of Twilight, I’m just looking after it for a friend).

Granted, I didn’t use the Kindle for very many weeks, but I never once found myself glad to have eight books with me instead of the regular old one; and I’m more than happy to lug several books away with me on holiday, just as I’m ok with shoving fourteen pairs of shoes into my suitcase rather than settling for just flip flops.

The other issues came down to availability; the first book I’d wanted (The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson) wasn’t available. You can go on about how many hundreds of thousands of books you can get on Kindle or any other brand of e-reader ‘til the cows come home, but it’ll never equal the number you can get in actual book form. Then I mentioned to a friend that I was reading Bossy Pants and she asked to borrow it – while you can lend Kindle books to friends in the US, it’s not allowed in the UK yet. So it was either say no or lend her the whole Kindle. So I said no (sorry Kat).

It’s kind of depressing for the people-watcher getting the tube these days. Instead of being able to judge people by the paper they read, you’re simply faced with a sea of rustling freesheets, and instead of being able to judge people by the book they’re reading, you can only judge them for the kind of e-reader they have – and on the District Line’s Edgware Road branch, they all have Kindles and iPads. Very dull.

I can’t speak for the rest of the country, or indeed the Underground, but on the District Line we’re turning into indistinguishable people-shaped blobs hiding behind our anonymous grey plastic slabs and that’s just no fun. Even if we are all secretly reading Mills and Boons on them.

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*Well, that’s a fallacy actually, because if you think about the blood, sweat, tears, time and talent that go into penning a novel, I think you’ll find you’re getting a bargain.