Source: Al-Arabiya
Iman KurdiI love books. Sometimes I think I love the physical aspect of seeing, touching, handling and browsing a book more than actually reading the content. Buying books is one of my favorite pastimes. I can spend hours in bookshops. I love them all, the multifloor emporiums where you can find a book on any subject and linger over them with a cup of coffee such as Foyles in London, the small independent bookshops where the employees write their take on each book on small cards displayed on the shelves, the lively buzz of the one-size-fits-all experience that is Jarir in Jeddah or Riyadh, and last but not least, my favorite pastime of all, a long stroll on Paris’ Left Bank browsing the second-hand book-sellers.
Buying books online is not quite the same. It’s not that I don’t like it. Sites like Amazon are useful. If I want to find a specific book quickly, I know I can get it at the click of a mouse. It’s also rather handy for sending gifts to people in far-away places. Not only do they deliver, they even gift-wrap.
But it’s not a pleasure; it’s a convenience. Moreover I only use it to buy titles that I am familiar with. I do not browse Amazon. Even though you can read the first pages of some books, the fact that you can’t touch the book and flick through it to decide whether or not you like it means I only buy books online that I have already identified and singled out for purchase.
Over the years I have found myself using Amazon less and less. It’s a guilt thing. Several of my favorite bookshops have closed. Though it is wrong to blame it all on Amazon and other online booksellers, they play a role in the demise of the independent bookshop, as do the big chain booksellers. Both of them have made it increasingly hard for independent booksellers to survive. You don’t need an MBA from Harvard to see that a bookshop such as Amazon which can stock its books in warehouses and sell them through the cheap marketing interface of the Internet has lower operating costs than a bookshop in a prime spot in the center of town, just like you don’t have to be a whizz to get that big booksellers can operate economy of scale which also gives them a competitive advantage over small bookshops.
If anything, I feel more guilt buying from Barnes and Noble or from Waterstones, though I still do it because of the ease of browsing their shelves. Besides I figure so long as I keep buying books all is well. My nightmare scenario is that books, the real paper and ink ones, will disappear and be replaced by that indigestible thing the e-book.
An e-book is not actually a book, it is a service. When you own a Kindle and you buy an e-book at the Kindle store, you are buying access to the content of the book in question. That content is downloaded onto your Kindle and you are free to read it at leisure. You cannot make a hard copy of the book on a computer. You cannot lend the book to someone else to read (though, of course, you could lend your Kindle to someone else, but that would stop you from reading the next book on your list). You don’t actually own the book; you only have right of access.
Last July when Amazon noticed that two books by George Orwell had been made available on the Kindle without the proper copyright, they deleted them. Users who had bought the books switched on their Kindles to find that the files auto-destructed. They got a refund but that is not the point. I also don’t like the fact that someone somewhere can know every book you have bought and read and could theoretically decide to erase any book from memory. It is Big Brother becoming reality, rather apt as Orwell’s 1984 was one of the two books deleted by Amazon.
It's not all bad. I can see the advantages of a device that can store 3,500 books. No longer do you have to carry half a dozen books in your suitcase when you go on holiday for instance. You can search through a database in an instant. It is excellent for reference books. It enables you to manage documents in a hassle-free and efficient manner. I like too the idea of having the full content of newspapers and magazines downloaded directly onto your Kindle. In essence it is a great tool for work.
The jury is out as to how e-books will affect publishing. Will it make more books available? Kind of like films that go straight to video, will we have two-tier literature with some books deemed to be of a good enough quality (or more accurately of a good enough marketability) to be printed both in paper and electronically and books with a smaller audience being made available only electronically?
This December Amazon sold more e-books than it did printed books. Does this mean the writing is on the wall for printed books? I have long been worried by the decline in the number of people reading books. Writers need readers. While we writers seem to mushroom at an alarming pace, discerning readers are fast becoming a rare breed. For one thing, many only want entertainment from a novel. They want the equivalent of a Hollywood movie, something that makes you turn the pages quickly anxious to see how it turns out. Nothing wrong with that except that entertainment only fulfills one small part of the role of literature in society.
For another, if all you want is entertainment, there are less demanding ways to do it — from switching on a television screen to twiddling your thumbs on a gamestation joystick.
We have an Arab saying: A book is like a garden carried in your pocket. Is the Kindle the equivalent to carrying the Amazonian rainforest in your pocket? Somehow I don’t think so. In theory it is the content that matters. It should not make any difference whether you read a book in print or on an electronic tablet, but the reality is that they are materially different experiences. A Kindle is practical, it is a good tool. A book is a source of life. It is a pleasure, an experience, and an event. Keep Kindle for the books that are a chore to read and build libraries for real books of wonder and knowledge.