Emma Cowing: A moving experience turned me to Kindle

Published on Wednesday 22 February 2012 12:45

I RECENTLY moved house. So recently in fact, that I have only just finished unpacking all the boxes. By which I mean it was actually three months ago and if I hadn’t had house guests staying last weekend I’d probably have left it another three months, but don’t judge me.

You know you’ve done it too. To be fair, I did make a decent stab at the majority of the packing cases in the first fortnight. Apart from the ones sporting ominous labels such as “hall cupboard miscellany” and “old cat beds”, I made quick work of all the essentials, not least because there is nothing worse than sitting on a cushionless sofa in a new house a month after you’ve moved in, staring at a bare wall and wondering if you’ll ever see your cheese grater again.

But there were some boxes that defeated me. Namely, the ones with the label “books”. They sounded harmless enough, and indeed, serried in their bookshelved ranks in my old pad, they looked fairly harmless too. But I was barely half an Ikea Billy bookcase worth’s into the packing process before I realised that books were going to be my bête noire.

I have hundreds of books. Thousands, possibly. In my teens and twenties, I perused the shelves of bookstores as though they were Tiffany & Co – swooning over the latest Anne Tyler novel as if it were a string of yellow diamonds. As the majority of those shops shut down I switched much of my habit online, with an Amazon account that would have rivalled a celebrity’s cocaine habit for sheer use and abuse.

I have forgone new outfits to buy books, and cancelled dates to read them. I have haggled over rare editions, tracked down long out of print tomes and even rearranged my living room around the colours of my book spines. I am, in short, a book addict.

So it may come as something of a shock to discover that I am now the proud owner of a Kindle. Strictly speaking, I am the owner of an iPad with a Kindle App, but you will no doubt get the idea when I tell you that since I bought it a month ago, I haven’t read a book – but I have read five novels electronically.

Julia Donaldson, the wonderful author of the Gruffalo series of books for children, and the current Children’s Laureate, would certainly have something to say about this.

Recently Donaldson opined on the thorny issue of library closures across Scotland. “People are kidding themselves,” she said. “If they think adults will download books to their Kindles if they haven’t got the reading bug as children.”

She’s right of course. My love for books was born out of old, much thumbed copies of Grimms Fairy Tales and Watership Down at my local library, but as an adult, I’m starting to feel there is a place for both. Friends have looked at me askance when I tell them I have succumbed to the joys of iBooks. “Oooh, you’ve got an iPad,” soon turns to “Emma, I’m disappointed in you”, but the truth is, there is a happy medium.

Up in the eaves of my house sit boxes of books (I may have elongated the truth when I said they were all completely unpacked), puffed up there by increasingly crest-fallen removal men, that I will never read again, some of which I have never read in the first place, and all of which I have no use for. I will take them to my local charity shop at some point, although how many of them will survive the dog-eared test is debatable.

Meanwhile on my iPad, I have a copy of an out of print book I have been trying to get hold of for years sitting waiting to be read. If I decide I don’t fancy it half way through I can simply press the delete button without troubling anything more than my little finger. There is a freedom to reading via a Kindle or a Tablet that hasmade me explore several authors, books and genres that I would usually ignore. It is no exaggeration to say that since I bought it, I have read more books than I did in the previous three months put together.

None of which means to say I will never buy another book, nor that children should have to miss out on library visits because Mummy might one day buy them a Kindle. Libraries are a crucial part of how we learn to read, and the proposed cuts to opening hours and staffing levels around the country are a disgrace. My hope is that today’s young library goers will become tomorrow’s electronic book readers with a healthy few bookcases to boot. Not only would it keep our love of literature alive, but it might make our removal men a little happier too.

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