My battle with the e-book

I love my book collection. When I grow up I want to have a house with a library and floor to ceiling books. Here's one I prepared earlier, just to give you a visual of what I have in mind:

Because of this, I have been a very vocal resistor of the new e-book phenomenon. The thought of discarding my dog eared books with their cracked spines and pages that smell like musty old English libraries  for a piece of technology is about as foreign to me as the Japanese language (I scored ½ out of 10 on a Japanese test in Grade 9...couldn’t tell my katakana from my hiragana).

That is until my good friend Suzi J introduced me to her Kindle . And I started to think of how much easier it would be to travel with one of those than five kilos of paperbacks, many of which often end up discarded in hotel rooms, the pockets of plane seats or donated to other needy travellers.  How much easier it would be to just connect up and download a book than to have to trawl foreign towns for second hand book stores with one shelf of English titles that usually consist of Mills and Boon and ten copies of The Da Vinci Code.

Although my biceps always appreciate the exercise they receive from holding up a book at an exact 90 degree angle to the sun when I lie on the beach, imagine how much easier a lightweight e-book would be! As long as you don't drop it in the sand. I doubt the e-reader would appreciate that very much.

I might even get to finish Shantaram after four years of looking at it on my bookshelf. Every time I go to pack it for a holiday or into my handbag for the bus ride to work, it always gets turfed out for one if it's smaller, more lightweight cousins.

And no more book sharing would mean no more unidentified sticky spots on the covers, hand written names of past owners on the title pages, or spaghetti bolognaise splatters on the pages.

But aren't all of these things part of what gives a book its character? How does a book get its character when its been downloaded from the Internet? There's something special about loaning on your favourite books to your favourite people. Giving them a USB stick just wouldn't feel quite the same. And I can't imagine for the first time author that getting a copy of your first book in your hands would be as momentous an occasion if it was sent to you as a link in an email.

For any avid reader, surely this is the great moral dilemma of our time. Are we selling ourselves out if we go digital? I hazard a guess that as usually occurs when it comes to technology, I am simply a late adopter. My Grandma probably has one by now. I just need to accept that times they are a changin' and put a Kindle on my Christmas wish list. But I still want that library.