Why You Should Buy A Kindle

I had to pause for thought the other day when a columnist wrote that they didn’t want a Kindle because then guests wouldn’t be impressed by their well-stocked bookshelves any longer.

I thought: Surely someone who is well-read can’t be so shallow!

Or maybe, like me, they’re just what is called a ‘late adopter’ of technology. When the e-reader first came out I, like so many, scoffed and blah-blah’ed about the smell of a new book and how proud I was of my bookshelf.

Then, alas, I moved to another continent.

Anyone who has moved house knows that worse than the sweat and swearing of hauling the refrigerator and washing machine up stairs is the ball-ache of carting boxes and boxes of books up the very same stairs. At least the telly gets up in one go, but a library of novels can take a week.

It’s a pain because books are heavy. I’m not talking about the intellectual weight of Tolstoy; I mean that you can’t shove all your books in one big-ass packing case. You’ve got to mix them in with clothes or stick ‘em in in smaller shoeboxes.

So when I moved from South Africa to England I had to part with all my imaginary friends and their exciting adventures. These fictional characters had changed my life, and as I handed them over to charity shops or second-hand stores I performed many tiny eulogies.

Two months later I unwrapped a shiny new Kindle courtesy of my amazing wife!

It is rare that as an adult one opens a gift that slaps a genuine look of wonder on their steadily-wrinkling mug, but that Christmas morning a childlike grin and sunfire eyes blossomed on my grizzled visage.

Since then I’ve become a wannabe poster boy for the Amazon Kindle.

There are so many reasons for this:

Bizarrely, it’s easier to read than a book. It must be the magic of e-ink, but my eyes don’t tire as fast with the Kindle and I can read for longer.

I love browsing in bookshops, and there is no bigger store than the online Amazon store. If you’re looking for your favourite author she’s right there – everything she’s ever written! If you like something Amazon will recommend stuff that’s similar. I’ve also found so many new, brilliant writers that just talking about it makes a big sparkling heart grow where my small black coal-shaped one used to live.

Also, you can only lend something to someone for a fortnight; and even though you can’t access it on your own Kindle when it’s lent, it comes straight back after those two weeks. This means that you never give someone something to read and never see it again.

I won’t bang on about how comfortable it is to hold or how cool you feel reading it on a bus when everyone thinks you’re much smarter than you really are – ooh, he’s reading; must be a doctor or something.

But the best part of a Kindle is this: I’ve often wondered how many books I’ve read in my lifetime. Heavy readers will say they’ve read over a thousand, but when you think about that it’s a book a week for just over nineteen years. Now imagine giving one to your kid when they start to read and in twenty years’ time that kid having a record of every book they’ve ever read.

Not only that, but they’ve still got all those novels stored forever.

Sad, but things like this make my heart dance like the Lilliputian toes of cherubs getting shot at by dirty Wild West gunslingers.

So you can keep your showy-offy bookshelf, fat and groaning with its unread copies of War & Peace and Noam Chomsky. We all know you hide Maeve Binchy in your sock drawer, and secretly read Twilight alone in the bog.