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I’ll never need batteries for a book

I’m pretty comfortable with technology.  I wouldn’t say I am a first mover or even an early adopter, optimistically a fast follower. I’ve had a Facebook account for >10 years, a LinkedIn account since about 2005, I have an iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro, Sonos etc etc. The thing about these technologies, hardware and software, is they are genuine innovations.  They created something new; they were original; solving a problem in a better way than the past or perhaps creating a solution to a problem people weren’t aware of.

But I will never use an e-reader.

I won’t argue that the Kindle isn’t a brilliant, elegant piece of technology and ridiculously convenient. It is. The fact you have access to thousands of books anywhere in the world is truly amazing.  I even bought one for my wife.  But to me it is a backward step: it is an inferior technology replacing a superior one.

For one thing you never need a battery for a real book.  It never runs out of power literally or metaphorically.  The idea that I can’t keep reading a book, not because there isn’t enough light available to see the words, but because it won’t turn on is ridiculous.  You can’t turn on a real book, because it is never off. My wife asked me last night when we went to bed, to remind her in the morning to plug in her Kindle, I promised I would and rolled over and opened my current book, Bend Sinister (Vladimir Nabokov), which I know will always be there for me to read, no matter how long it lies waiting on my bedside table.

For me books are a whole body experience; a contact sport.  From the cover (see my earlier post ‘You can judge a book by its cover’) to the weight and the texture and smell of the pages.  Each book is different and the experience of reading it should be too.  A real book engages at least three, if not four, senses uniquely for every book.

Each book creates a different sensory experience – sight, touch, smell and even hearing.  With an e-reader the process of reading is the same whether you’re reading a complicated mountain of a novel like Ulysses (James Joyce) or a short, clever fable like Fup (Jim Dodge) – the physical experience is the same.

In a real book, the pages can be different textures and sizes – smooth, rough, tall, wide – or different shades of white, cream or  grey.  I have an edition of Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish published by Picador where the text subtly changes colour throughout the book from black to khakis to purples, greens, blues, navy and brown; it’s beautiful.  And then there’s the incredible paintings of fish, for which each chapter is named, by the real Van Diemonian (Tasmanian) convict artist William Buelow Gould.  You can’t possibly experience the whole story without appreciating what these fish look like through the eyes of a man, for who’s life the story is a fictionalised account of.

And then there’s the joy of sitting in a room and looking at a shelf full of books.  Each book brings back memories of time, place and experience that no flat, rectangular grey piece of plastic, circuitry and lithium-ion could ever do.  I love being able to browse books in my and other people’s homes.  While my wife has a Kindle, she appreciates the physical presence of real books, having one day, when I was out of the house, reorganised the books on our bookshelves by colour.  Granted this system drives me mad, as I prefer a more logical filing system using that wonderful thing called the alphabet, but I will agree it looks brilliant.

A bit sentimental? OK, so let me take a more rational approach.  While there appears to be some debate, most credible sources suggest there is less environmental impact through the production of real books than e-readers and if I ever contemplated disposing of a real book, not that I would, I could simply put it with my other paper recycling, or even bury it, knowing it’ll break down and feed the garden like it fed my mind.  An e-reader on the other hand will require me to drop it off at my council’s local waste collection facility – a sad, cold, wasteful exercise.

It’s certainly getting harder to buy real books, as physical book retailers in the Western World suffer the shifting tastes of consumers and the economics of running an increasingly low margin retail business.  I recently bought some books online for the first time ever.  It wasn’t the same as going in to a bookshop, just a necessary step, and some evidence I’m not a Luddite.  However I will always prefer the experience of buying real books in real bookshops from real people and I will only ever read real books, even if I have to end up printing them myself.

All power to the readers of e-readers out there, but ideas bound up in pages of reconstituted wood pulp and ink will always ignite my imagination and soul more powerfully than any electronic technology.

You can judge a book by its cover

I love books.  They are an important part of my life.  And I hate bad books … may be a little more passionately than the average person perhaps. And I reckon I’ve stumbled on to a great way of easily avoiding really crap books.

Around 5-10 years ago I started to notice that certain books attracted me time and time again.  I found myself being drawn to these books like iron filings to a magnet or my son to mischief, or whatever other metaphor you might choose to use.  I’ve tried to break the habit to avoid the risk of reading some clone of a book I had read previously, but I just can’t help myself; and it has absolutely nothing to do with the story, genre, author, book reviews or recommendations.

I have come to realise that a sure fire way of choosing a great book is to choose it purely by the cover (or the title).

I know it’s superficial, but I am absolutely convinced I’m right.  Perhaps I am superficial but all you have to do is go into one of the big chain book stores (if there is still one near you) or online to see the range of covers available and you will start to get the idea – Jackie Collins vs. Haruki Murakami; Stephen King vs. Peter Carey; or Mills & Boon vs. Penguin Classics.

Obviously a lot of marketing effort goes into making sure books attract people to buy them … but it has to be more than that.  The conclusion I have come to is that the cover of the book is a reflection of how much the publisher(s) has fallen in love with the story – they have gone out of their way to make sure the design is as high quality as the story; the story deserves a cover where just as much effort has gone into getting it right as went into getting the story right.  They care enough to pay a real designer or artist, rather than a marketer, to use the story as inspiration for the creation of a unique work of art; a visualisation of the story in images rather than words.

The title of a book is just as good a guide, and a great title often goes hand-in-hand with a a great cover, which I hypothesise goes hand in hand with a great book.  How could you not buy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Torday), The Man Who Was Thursday (Chesterton), A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole), Tuesdays with Morrie (Albom), The Devil and Miss Prym (Coelho), A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Lewycka), The Idiot (Dostoyevsky), A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In (Magnus Mills), Legend of a Suicide (Vann), From the Mouth of the Whale (Sjón), A Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Murakmi).  A real mix of genres, themes and eras, but all spine-tingling great books.

In fact the inspiration for the name of this blog is my favourite book title of all time, But Soft: We Are Observed by Hilaire Belloc. In five simple words it conveys so many layers of meaning, even if, by today’s standards, the phrasing is a little anachronistic (it was written in 1928). It’s almost atmospheric; I can’t say it without whispering it: imagining myself in a dark room of a quiet house, my pulse starting to race in the realisation I may have been discovered. And when was the last time you saw punctuation in the title of a book? The only other one I have on my bookshelf is They Shoot Horses Don’t They? by Horace McCoy.  The use of the colon shows just how powerful grammatical devices can be.  It forces the reader to think about the title, to look ahead, wondering why we have to be careful or quiet, who “we” is and who has observed us. It lays down a challenge to a prospective reader – I dare you to not pick me up and start reading. I love it.

So have a think about how you buy books and next time you’re in a book shop, or more likely, scanning Book Depository or Amazon, don’t fight your intuition, be superficial and let the cover or the title choose you.