Last week my best friend bought a Kindle device — I didn’t expect him to.
For 14 long years we have been shopping together for books, making the occasional outing to the nearest bookstore even after the arrival of Amazon and Flipkart into our lives. “I can smell a good book,” he once told me during the Landmark sale — the much-awaited annual event where spotting a book worth billing would be like finding a needle in a haystack — and since then I have trusted his instincts and let him choose books for me as well.
When I told him I was not at all happy about his latest purchase, he replied sheepishly that he had bought the device not so much for himself as his daughter, who is 11. His explanation made me unhappier: he had surrendered to — and therefore helped perpetrate — the common belief that future generations were going to read from tablets and not physical books.
I am no fuddy-duddy. People of my generation — I turn 44 next month — appreciate the electronic way of life far more than others because we spent our youth in the ‘manual’ era. We stood in long queues to buy train and movie tickets; we eagerly waited outside PCO booths to make phone calls; we queued up in banks with a cheque leaf to withdraw money; we would be besieged by attendants the moment we entered a bookshop: “Yes sir, what book are you looking for?”
What a blessing, therefore, that thanks to an electronic device, I am now able to buy my books online — it could be the latest work of Haruki Murakami or the first edition of a book by V.S. Naipaul signed by him. But when books themselves become an electronic device — that’s not good news. Just imagine waking up to a world where all physical books are replaced overnight by a tablet.
To begin with, you will find your personal bookshelf missing. Then you will find the libraries vaporising. If things keep going on the way they are, there will be no physical record of the human civilisation from the 22nd century onwards — everything will be online. And when records are only online, they are prone to alteration and deletion, depending on the whims of the people who hold the reins.
Already the electronic era has killed one genre of literature: letter-writing. If at all the world gets to read the letters that Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to his daughter, or the exchanges between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald or between Henry Miller and Anais Nin — that’s because these people had put pen to paper. The correspondences of present and future literary giants are likely to remain unknown to the world because emails are private — one would have to hack into their accounts to gain access to their thoughts.
There’s something else about physical books: no two books are the same. Each has a unique texture and smell, and its pages take on your personality as the years wear on. But on an e-book reader, all books are just that: a mass of electronic words. I wonder if my friend will still be able to smell a good book.
