Word Has It

 I made one of my sporadic visits to amazon.com yesterday, only to find myself looking at something called Kindle instead of the usual recommendations. Wow, I thought. Finally a technology for bookworms. I was getting tired of the monopoly boys enjoy over techie conversations as they brandish cool phones and music players. All of amazon’s ebooks contained in a slim booklike device, accessible from anywhere in the world. It struck me as the perfect gift for a certain relative whose nose is always buried in some new buy with a boring academic title.

I was a bit startled to find a feature on the very same product in today’s paper. Digital reading devices seem to be all the rage. But a spasm of panic gripped me when I grasped the author’s gently warning tone. The enthusiastic quotes from publishing houses did little to pacify me. Everyone is nodding approvingly at the prospect of digital solutions taking over every aspect of human life and culture. We evolved from papyrus and vellum to the printing press, and now it’s time to embrace electronics. The wave has not yet reached epic heights, but once this baby is combined with a phone and mp3 player, it will capture all markets and imaginations completely.

And the big question is (well, for me atleast), will this eventually phase out books as we know them? A world without the printed word is inconceivable, blasphemous. Imagine not having a bookshop to browse through on rainy days. No matter how elegant Kindle’s leather jacket is, the worn gold-printed covers of the classics on my bookshelf beat it hollow.

And what of special copies? Fine editions? The book you lent to a friend and miss till this day. The favourite novel you thumbed through countlessly till its dog ears became a permanent fixture in the universe.

Kindle has a capacity for 1500 ebooks at a time. Which of these will be marked as special to the reader, and how? Which will bear coffee stains that make you frown, or fond scribbles from aunts that make a slow smile spread across your face?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for radical revolutions. If your brat is the sort of kid who won’t want to soak up literature unless he can access it by pushing a few buttons, by all means give him an eReader. If you’re a professional on the move who needs volumes of ready reference material, this one’s definitely for you. Kindle supposedly uses a papery background and inked font for its display to make its readers feel at home. A French publisher CafeScribe has invented add-on stickers with a ‘’musty, bookish’’ smell. There will be plenty of takers for these – readers sitting hunched on airport chairs clutching their Kindles, dreaming that they’re curled up in the armchair in their study.

But I will never for a moment allow myself to think that I’ve reached the pinnacle of bibliophily just by acquiring this device. Because my Shakespeare collection was handed down by my grandfather.