Thank you to those contributors above who proudly admit that they don't own a kindle even if Guardian keeps on plugging its advertorials whenever they could for Kindles and IPads (of the latter, if you read the Technology pages, even hardcore Apple fans such as meestersmith are sick of the bias shown by the Guardian when Charles was reviewing the latest Android device).
It's a shame that the Guardian can't seem to give the whole e-book thing a rest, even when simply asking authors / journos to nominate their summer reading.
It seems to be assumed that one MUST now, by decree of the Guardian-sanctioned literati, leave Big Fat Books behind as you are only allowed to consume them in electronic form, because to do otherwise will cause untold damage to your wrists and wallet (via luggage charge) and most importantly, will be Deeply Unhip in An Electronic Age.
Me. I just shake my head sadly at this state of affairs wrought by people so brainwashed by consumerism that they suddenly find all kind of faults with physical books that have been perfectly serving us readers for centuries until the corporates want to start selling us a new bottle. I can't express this more eloquently than Zygmunt Bauman himself, whose physical book (I lament the fact that I even had to put the word "physical" to denote a book!) I've just finished recently:
"One kind of distress is a side-effect of living in a consumer society. In such a society, the roads are many and scattered, but they all lead through shops. Any life pursuit, and most significantly the pursuit of dignity, self-esteem and happiness, requires the mediation of the market; and the world in which such pursuits are inscribed is made up of commodities -- objects judged, appreciated or rejected according to the satisfaction they bring to the world's consumers. They are also expected to be easy to use and bring satisfaction immediately and in a user-friendly manner, calling for little or no effort and certainly no sacrifice on the user's side... One way or another, the offending object (not up to its promise, too awkward for trouble-free use, or squeezed dry of the pleasures it was capable of giving) is disposed of. One does not swear oaths of loyalty to things whose sole purpose is to satisfy a need, a desire or a want."(p. 107 from "Liquid Life")
I am genuinely saddened by the trend that more and more readers and even writers themselves see books as the "offending object", now all of a sudden "too awkward for trouble-free use" just because the people who want to sell us new gadgets have told us that you can't carry real books on travel holidays anymore as they are all by definition "too bulky" simply by dint of their "crime" of existing in real three-dimensional space.
Who would have thought that we readers are just mere consumers of literature? Somehow in the last couple of years, simply because of the appearance of an electronic reading gadget on the market, many readers are all of a sudden turning up their noses at physical books, books that have served us for centuries if not millenia. Those of us who dare to question the value proposition of e-books have been unceremoniously insulted and jeered on book threads as stick-in-the-mud Luddites who fail to "get with the programme", and the most damning insult of all, as people who "fetishise" books as an "object"!!!!! This, spoken by the very same people who never reckon with their own unthinking gadget fetishism, who never stopped to ask themselves, Why the hell am I complaining about physical books and looking down on physical book lovers just because I personally prefer a newfangled reading gadget?
If we (and by we, I meant real book lovers) have really objectified reading the way the e-book evangelists have accused us of, we would have no qualms about dumping the old book in favour of a new gadget exactly the way the e-book evangelists have themselves behaved. But no, it is actually precisely because we don't fetishise books as objects that we are not persuaded of the value of newfangled gadgets purporting to give us "new books". It is precisely because we book lovers see ourselves as far more than mere book consumers that we do actually swear oaths of loyalty to our physical books -- those friends with whom we have travelled and journeyed far and wide to distant horizons, and deeply into the human condition, those friends who carry our personal history within their pages by the way we've scrawled marginalia and dog-earred them and by the bookmarks and dedications we made within their bodies. Only self-interested sociopaths will turn their nose upon their loyal and dependable friends of hundreds of years' standing, and sneer at those old-fashioned enough to want to remain loyal to their old friends.
(Btw, my comments are pre-modded for some time now because I previously criticised Guardian journalists for their soft-pedalling of our demand for real justice on the LIBOR scandal, so I won't be too surprised if the mods too deem this too critical to see the light of day).
Amended to add:
Oh, and "Liquid Life" by Zygmunt Bauman is a great read for all seasons, but especially great for summer of 2012 as its arguments are very pertinent to recent events as uncovered in the banking sector -- you do have to read through to the final chapters though to get the full force of Bauman's argument, but it is a slim book and it even has a picture of people swimming and relaxing in an azure blue pool on the cover if one needs to pretend one's reading a light-weight summer book rather than a solid but succinct treatise of political philosophy on one's holiday.
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