Anna Gruber

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I love reading books. If I am on holiday for 2 weeks I can easily get through a good 4 or 5 books and then steal the one my husband has only got 30 pages into, and finish that off. It isn’t just reading the book itself, it is going into Waterstones with its creaky floors and spending hours reading the synopses, trying to decide which ones I want. When I was little my sister and I went into town with my dad every Sunday to pick a book from Waterstones and made sure we finished it before our next Sunday outing.

Sad (and not in the boo hoo sense), you might say but I don’t think people, especially children, read enough now. My mum is a teacher in a primary school and she said since I was at school the reading ages of children has significantly dropped, with some having never set foot in a book shop.

When the iPhone ebook app came out I was horrified. Why don’t people just buy a paperback? Don’t people love the “Waterstones experience”? After wondering how you could sit on a beach on holiday holding an iPhone “flicking” through pages of the latest novel, I decided maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. If it gets people reading, albeit on an electrical item, surely that is a good thing. As a BlackBerry user (far more sensible than iPhone users, he he) I have no such app, however, I have seen it on friends’ iPhones and I can’t say I really “get it”, but I do understand its uses. If you are constantly travelling by train for example, or just waiting to meet someone, reading your ebook is a lot less hassle than making sure you are constantly carrying the real thing.

As long as book shops don’t become obsolete because of apps like this, I think the good old fashioned hardback reader can live happily alongside the modern electronic reader.
Tags: Apple

Discussion

Posted by James on Aug 25th, 2010
I'm also an avid reader (though from the sound of it I'm not as quick as you!), but I wasn't horrified by the likes of the Kindle and iPhone ebook apps. Personally, I like the idea of being able to carry around hundreds / thousands of books in one device (although the iPhone thing probably would be too small) just as much as I liked the idea of being able to carry around thousands of albums prior to the iPod launch.

However, I take your point - there is something slightly hollow about the experience, it's almost like the magnitude of the information you can carry in your pocket cheapens the experience - I also often find that too much choice leads to apathy. I expect that these are primarily psychological issues, which will not plague the generation that grows up reading on the Kindle and listening to the iPod and knows no different.

Also, there are so many traditional books in existence that the traditional second hand book shop is here to stay for a while yet - what we might see is the death of the big retailers like Waterstones (not the end of the world in my opinion - the Waterstones Experience for me is having to pay over the odds for books I could have got cheaper elsewhere whilst surrounded by celebrities gurning on the front cover of their latest ghost-written biography).

On the whole, I reckon ebooks/ereaders are a good thing - although reading them on the beach could prove tricky.
Posted by Col on Aug 25th, 2010
I can't read. Can someone tell me what its like?
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