Tim Cornwell: Why I can't warm to prospect of Kindling

Published on Thursday 9 September 2010 15:09

Please, Santa: don't buy me an e-reader for Christmas. I have a weakness for gadgets as much as any man, but I know where that machine, and all the many volumes on it, will be a few years hence: in a drawer, or a musty packing case, with all the other electronic detritus.

Last week our family's desktop computer went to our local stockist for repair. It's a flat screen iMac, bought in 2004; it looks as up to date as any in the shop. A logic board was blown and bulging; the machine was "obsolete", we were told, in the eyes of the manufacturer; they could no longer order the part.

This is not a quarrel with Apple computers: I've been using them for two decades, from the days they pioneered an amazing device called the mouse, and a beautifully intuitive filing system based on folders inside folders.

But merely maintaining the computers in our household has been a running battle to keep the hardware up to date with the software, as the "obsolete" label claims one machine after another. Any new device - an ipod, a camera - requires an older one to be upgraded.

Our oldest computer, a hand-me down, has survived ten years; but it can't function with any purchasable printer, and this month declared its web browser to be out of date. Files are downloaded - if you catch them in time - from one hard drive to another, until the latest software can't read them.

My current aversion to e-readers is not driven by the fear that digital books will do to publishers and their employees what the internet has done to the newspaper trade - though as a newspaper journalist of 25 years, they will have my sincerist sympathies, tinged with a bit of schadenfreude.

Nor is it author Margaret Atwood's point that you can't read (or drop) an e-book in the bath. It's not even about cherishing the book as a beautiful object. It's simply about longevity.

Probably the world's oldest multiple-page book is one discovered in a tomb by a canal in Bulgaria. With six bound sheets of 24 carat gold, and illustrations of a mermaid and some soldiers, it dates to about 600 BCE, is written in the lost Etruscan language - what could be called a bit of a software problem.

But in Britain we have, for example, St Cuthbert's Gospel of John, placed in the saint's tomb in 697AD and dating back decades earlier, currently on loan to the British Library. William Caxton's first printed books in English survive after more than five centuries; they are lasting memory banks.

The latest Kindle vying for attention in the UK market is praised by friends as cheaper, lighter, for longer battery life. Turning pages on an iPad is incredibly cool. Sure, they'll carry thousands of classics or airport books, that kind that many people leave in a seat-back. One book collector friend welcomes the new technology as simply the modern equivalent of moving from hand-written manuscripts to print; it keeps out of print books available.

But what do you do with an old Kindle? Type that question into Google, and you'll find some rather sad conversations. The machines were launched less than three years ago, but are in their third incarnation already.

"I've decided not to give my old K1 away for now, but now I'm kind of stuck with what to do with it," one posting begins. The answersDeregister, download, donate it, delete your store files, switch subscriptions, check with the content provider. Turn in your K2 for a K3, or lower the battery charge to 40 per cent, the best for storage, keep it somewhere dry, and hope to turn it on in ten years time.

With a printed book, you have a choice: keep and value it, pulp it, pass it on; pick it up second-hand. It can't be recalled, rewritten, or rendered obsolete on your bookshelf, except possibly by fire or flood. It doesn't need a machine to run it, particularly one - if current computers are anything to go by - with a life of three or even five years.

Of course, first-generation e-readers will carry value, in time. In a hundred years, a great-grandchild could be sitting on a collector's item. But rare e-books, like real books, will be valued by edition, condition and dust jacket. Make sure to keep them in their original box. Preferably unopened.