Last of the bibliophiles
Georgina Guedes
I’m kicking and thrashing against a tide of my peers all rushing to lay their hands on an iPad. Give me a good old ink-and-paper book any day – except there is something so sexy about an electronic reader that it may just pull me under.
I am not a luddite. I love the simplicity of sexy new technology. The sensation of holding my first iPod was like being transported into a future of minimalist, beautiful, interactive gadgetry that responds to a gentle caress and talks back in dulcet tones when you address it (ultimately).
So I really should be excited about the iPad. But I’m not. I think the reason for this is that I love books. Not reading – books. I love starting a new book so much that when I buy one, as soon as I’ve paid for it, I reverently open it and read the first paragraph of the first chapter, just to whet my appetite for the pleasures to come. When I finish reading, I close the book, feeling the weight of a thick wedge of paper sheets in my hand, and bring the book to my nose and smell it, taking in every sensation it offers.
I judge people by the books they keep. When I visit a new friend’s house, one of the first things I’ll do is browse their bookshelves. I’m not a literary snob, though, and accept any (or just about any) kind of book in favour of not reading at all. I read anything from chick lit to classics, and am happy to forgive a Wilbur Smith or John Grisham, as long as they’re nudging shoulders with an extensive collection of other reading material.
`Dying race of books’
My one-year-old daughter is shaping up to be a fair bibliophile herself. “Buk” was one of her first words, and she claps her hands with glee when I head for the sizeable shelf in her bedroom. Children’s books offer incredible levels of sensory interactivity today – they have cut-out holes, fuzzy areas, hidden sounds, lift-the-flaps, impossible pop-ups, scratch-and-smells and rotatable bits.
In my most fervent “Champion of the dying race of books” moments, I think to myself smugly that no iPad would ever deliver all of those sensations to delight the abecedarian mind. But then I find myself musing, sadly, that all this early-childhood visual glory only serves to engender a further love of books, which will all be a bit pointless if the next point of access into the world of literature is an electronic chunk of metal and plastic.
The iPad will rob us of our ability to appreciate books in their truest, ink-on-paper form, and, as they become more ubiquitous, of my ability to deliver damning indictments of new friends. They will also take away my grounds to insist that my daughter spend less time looking at a screen and just sits down with a good book.
I’ve already learnt my lesson on that front when, in a moment of weakness, I showed her a YouTube video on my BlackBerry, and she was far more delighted than she would have been by another session with The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Junior iPads will probably offer simple, early-learning, interactive pleasures for the next generation of children – and no one who’s lugged a satchel full of textbooks up a hill from the bus stop will ever bemoan the demise of the textbook as it’s reborn in an electronic reader-friendly format.
The next big thing
I am also forced to acknowledge that it’s possible that I could come to love the minimalist controls, the large-screen interface, the mind-boggling convenience and super-sexiness of an iPad. But it still requires some stretch of my imagination.
I love a pulpy, soft-cover book as much as – if not more than – a hardback, dust-jacketed novel. But probably 75 years ago when Penguin was launched to make books affordable to the average person, bibliophiles predicted, with a great wailing and gnashing of teeth, the demise of the proper hardback. And some centuries before that, there were probably some bald-headed friars with noses out of joint at Mr Guttenberg’s marvellous invention that rendered redundant vellum illumination. So I’m probably blowing against the wind here, like generations of old goats before me.
The iPad is the next thing in reading – and it does the job beautifully. Liquid ink has replaced words on paper. Perhaps in 15 years, I’ll be boxing my pointless paperbacks and chipping my bookshelves for firewood with much the same relief that I felt when it no longer became necessary to dedicate lounge floor space to CD racks. Has there ever been an uglier form of music storage? Thank Jobs for iPods!
So, in ten or even only five years, I’ll probably be judging new friends by their iPad reading lists and iPod playlists, and using bookshelf space for unelectronic artwork – unless that’s the next thing to go digital. |
