(This post is not a reasoned and logical argument for or against the reading of ebooks vs “real” books, or shopping for books in online stores as compared to brick and mortar stores. If you are looking for something of that nature, might as well stop here. What this post is, though, it a mere statement of some facts, and an expression of what feel about said facts.)
Fact 1: I like reading. I read books, magazines (when I can lay my hands on them), articles, poems, plays, essays and whatever else catches my fancy. I read online, as well as on paper.
Fact 2: I have owned an ebook reader for more than two years now. It was one of the first high-value purchases I made when I got a job, the enticement being the mobility it would afford me. In two years, I have managed a grand total of four and a half books on the reader, all of them from the light-weight, easy to read Percy Jackson series of novels.
Fact 3: I shop for books. A lot of books, far more than I read, or can realistically hope to read. I buy them, nevertheless, in a sort of wishful thinking that someday I will get around to reading them. I have shopped online for books three times, all three occasions in the past twelve months. The websites involved have been Flipkart and Indiatimes. I have been left with a mess twice, out of those three times, which considering the maniacal efficiency and customer satisfaction (?) levels claimed by sites like Flipkart, seems to be an error, an outlier in the undoubtedly vast data set which online bookstores must have, of customers served and customers satisfied. However, in my own personal universe, two glitches out three, three books undelivered out of a collective ten ordered do assume a relatively large proportion.
I used to be reading fiend; this party stemmed from the fact that when in school (as in in the lower classes like 5th and 6th), I was one of the shortest and youngest kids in my class (which trend continued till I crossed tenth- despite a change of school, and as anyone who has stayed in a boarding will tell you, when you are vertically handicapped that way, your best friends turn out to be mostly either books or other vertically handicapped, or horizontally overendowed kids your age. Being a smartass know it all does not help. So I zipped through library cards, blazing a trail through the brilliant and engaging world of Enid Bloyton and Noddy, graduated to the Hardy Boys and *shudder* a few Nancy Drew novels, Aesop’s fables and Hindi literature, so that by the time my boards neared, I was running through Sidney Sheldon and Robert Ludlum and Arthur Hailey *shudder again* and had developed a taste for Frederick Forsyth which I retain to this day, despite having read all of his novels many times over. My understanding of novel writing as a form of art, and my appreciation of novels as art ran so deep that I was profoundly affected my Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, and thought it was a great novel. I remember reading it several times in one year. (My perceptions changed later, rather radically, but that is another story).
Anyway, the point of this whole rather boring catalogue of mostly bad books is that with college, one grew out of it. The other point is that they were all paper books, you went to the library, you picked one up, the librarian took the index card out, made a double entry (one on your card, indicating the book you were issuing, and one the book, indicating you as the issue), and you got to take the book to your hostel, for you read as you pleased-lying on your bed, sitting on a cricket ground, in the open air theatre, in back benches in boring classes or sprawled on the common room sofa after lights out.
Then, came college, and the proud ownership of a laptop (yes, of course), and a rather depleted library which was mostly full of dull books on accounting and marketing theory and human resource management (?) tomes, and a joke of a fiction section, in a town which acquired a Spencer’s bookstore just a couple months before I was due to leave it. And a fiendish affair with ebooks-I read a lot of ebooks there-Foundation, Narnia, the entire Alistair Maclean collection (at least thrice- and still reading again and again), and so on (plus quite a few books downloaded and read on the office desktop during the long, empty hours of the first month of the summers project). It was not until I joined a real job (which involved facing a computer monitor for a large part of the day trying to fit formulae in cells, colour boxes and draw attractive lines- in terms of aesthetics and otherwise) that the idea of coming home and trying to derive pleasure from reading which involved facing the screen again became repulsive. Also, immersing yourself in your laptop screen hardly sounds so pleasing to the ear, does it.
So, I bought a book reader, and as stated above, it did not quite work for me, not for lack of trying. But probably because of that vague reason which we mostly state in life as ‘it did not click for me.’ And yet, weirdly, I am looking forward eagerly to the release of the Kindle Fire, which I am most certainly going to buy. This is a paradox I cannot explain. As far as the reading ebooks on reader experience goes, I own an Infibeam Pi, and have always found it very convenient, easy on the eye, and never minded the slightly clunky interface (more so considering two and a half years ago, the alternatives were not all that thick on the ground). All the clichés about the feel of the book, the smell of printing ink, the pleasure of hearing the crackle of a page as you turn it I will leave away from this, except for making a brief note that yes, these are important to me, they make the reading more pleasurable, but a shitty book is as shitty in any format, and a very very good book, while denied these physical pleasures when read on a device, still remains very, very good. And carrying an ebook reader which weighs maybe 180-200gms around is definitely more comfortable than having a 5lb Infinite Jest sharing space in your laptop bag with your 6lb laptop, making it essentially a donkey’s load.
So, I bought a book reader, and as stated above, it did not quite work for me, not for lack of trying. But probably because of that vague reason which we mostly state in life as ‘it did not click for me.’ And yet, weirdly, I am looking forward eagerly to the release of the Kindle Fire, which I am most certainly going to buy. This is a paradox I cannot explain. As far as the reading ebooks on reader experience goes, I own an Infibeam Pi, and have always found it very convenient, easy on the eye, and never minded the slightly clunky interface (more so considering two and a half years ago, the alternatives were not all that thick on the ground). All the clichés about the feel of the book, the smell of printing ink, the pleasure of hearing the crackle of a page as you turn it I will leave away from this, except for making a brief note that yes, these are important to me, they make the reading more pleasurable, but a shitty book is as shitty in any format, and a very very good book, while denied these physical pleasures when read on a device, still remains very, very good. And carrying an ebook reader which weighs maybe 180-200gms around is definitely more comfortable than having a 5lb Infinite Jest sharing space in your laptop bag with your 6lb laptop, making it essentially a donkey’s load.
The most talked about point about the ebook readers convenience which is touted by the companies selling these devices, of course, is the connectivity. The almost ‘point-and-shoot’ kind of purchasing ability they offer, an infinite freedom from the confines of the brick and mortar book store. No hassle of negotiating traffic, dealing with bad ATMs, non-connected card swipe machines, bad public transport, no crunch of actual, physical space to keep the books, no lag between desire and its fulfillment. You want a book, here, order it on your device, and download it from our servers. Instant. And related to this, these store’s other cousin, the online bookstore which can offer you both ebooks and actual, real hardcopy, paper books. Delivered to your own personal doorstep, without any shipping charges, withing 48 hours of your order by express courier. Tired of looking for a book in a bookstore? Order with us.
A bricks and mortar shop will never have the wherewithal to fulfill all your book-search needs. Because they have a limited few hundred square feet of space, a few thousand square feet of shelf space. They have kids playing in their alleys, noisy brats who will ruin your experience. They are poorly indexed, our search is customized. Go on, type in your keywords- ISBN is best, if not try the book’s name, if you don’t even remember that, key in the first or last names of the author, and we will still find it for you. Go on, try our shiny new algorithm. What do they have? Shelves upon shelves of poorly catalogued books, see- there is a crime novel you were looking for, skulking in the science fiction shelf. No such glitches with us. And to top it all, we offer you lower prices. Come, love us. To which all, I say a mildly scornful ‘FINE!’
A bricks and mortar shop will never have the wherewithal to fulfill all your book-search needs. Because they have a limited few hundred square feet of space, a few thousand square feet of shelf space. They have kids playing in their alleys, noisy brats who will ruin your experience. They are poorly indexed, our search is customized. Go on, type in your keywords- ISBN is best, if not try the book’s name, if you don’t even remember that, key in the first or last names of the author, and we will still find it for you. Go on, try our shiny new algorithm. What do they have? Shelves upon shelves of poorly catalogued books, see- there is a crime novel you were looking for, skulking in the science fiction shelf. No such glitches with us. And to top it all, we offer you lower prices. Come, love us. To which all, I say a mildly scornful ‘FINE!’
Because, there still exists a thing called the book shopping experience. Beset by bad traffic, irritated by pesky, untethered kids, my nerves jangling with miscatalogued books, I would still prefer to go to a brick and mortar bookstore to buy my books. This gives me the liberty of actually looking at the book, physically touching it, maybe reading the introduction or the foreword, reading a page instead of just reading the blurb of a few hundred anal retentive reviews on a website, if intrigued enough but not convinced, maybe sitting there on one of the stools now-a-days bookstores so thoughtfully provide, and reading through a chapter to make my mind, look at the last page to see how many pages (yes, that is a must, preferably between 300-600), looking at the typeset, the font used, calligraphy, coverart- all these things that is neutered in the sterile environment of the web.
But one thing more than anything else, one thing which strikes me every time I go to a bookstore is the sheer pleasure of finding something I did know I wanted, but wanted nevertheless. An online retail site a good and convenient way of finding and ordering a book I know I want. But the whole point of going to a bookstore, at least to me, if finding out books I did not know existed. One of the best books I read in 2010 was one such happy accident. One of the best this year was another such. And there have been a few more such in between. That one thing even the best search algorithm cannot give me, if I go to shop online for books. Because, Mr. Algorithm, you can only make a successful search for me if you know what I want. How can you search me what even I do not know I want? So, here is to the joys of shopping for books in actual, physical bookstores. May they last long.
PS: The 2010 novel was one called Wizard of The Crow by a Kenyan author named Ngugi wa Thiong’o. The stumbled and found novel for 2011 was Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. Both are positively brilliant novels, and highly recommended, if you care for my opinion. Here is a review of Wizard of The Crow in Salon.
Update/Apology: One of the hazards of writing a blogpost while drinking beer is that the brain is often more nimble than the fingers, leading to a lot of missing conjunctions, inappropriate punctuation, and a lot of missed/unobserved muddle-ups with autocorrect. This post is embarrassingly full of them, most of which will be corrected tonight. Till then, I apologize for the inconvenience, and hope that you still get the point I am trying to convey.
Update 2: Since writing this post, I tweeted to @flipkart, the Twitter presence of Flipkart, that I did not want store credits, I wanted my books. Since then, I have recieved a mail confirming that my book has been shipped, an email confirming that my book is our for delivery, another informing me that the actual price of the book is slightly less than what I was charged for it, that some store credits still remain in my account, even after me getting my book. Today, I recieved calls from Flipkart's Mumbai and Bangalore offices confirming the same, the Mumbai office also calling to confirm that they had tried to deliver the book, but since my office was closed, they will be back on Monday. This is exceptional fair play, and speaks volumes about Flipkart's committment to customer satifaction. Thank you, it feels good to be cared for as a customer. While a website still does not, for me, meet the challenge of discovering unknown books, I am at the same time pretty sure that I will shopping with Flipkart more and more often in the future.
