A fire was kindled when I first read about the Kindle. But then my region was not 'covered' and the impulsive buying did not happen. Now when every manufacturer has given us doses of tablets and pads to use , Kindle has again fired .This time in colour. But if I am 'kindling' books why do I need colour. I still like my books black on white.
So , for my generation , which pioneered the computer revolution and (but) still talks of the good-old days of KBs and FDDs and mag tapes - what fire gets kindled ?
I tried the audio books . Did not find the experience very enjoyable. Could not dog-ear the cassette tapes and ended up going back and forth to find the last read paragraph or page. Concentration was another issue. My first attempt in this mode of 'reading' was listening to Covey's '7 Habits' in the car. The cassette was a takeaway from a training and it took me many weeks to finally complete the 'reading'. Then came the audio-CDs . Again the old issue of 'cannot dog-ear'.
From the audio books , I moved to e-books. This certainly was better and was almost as good as the good old humble books. The only downside being the reading locations . I cannot read the e-book on my laptop from my favourite reading corner for obvious reasons. I have tried to coax the text-to-speech tool to read the e-books for me. However a new issue came up with this - 'john' or 'jane' who reads it are highly unemotional. They read with such monotonous styles that they can make Rip van Winkles out of insomniacs .
While I wait fired up for my kindle - I think of the grand libraries that I have spent hours in and the lovely book shops where I have browsed happily for long. What will happen to them . Will they become museums . I look around to see that book shops are disappearing or evolving to a wider experience store. The area taken up by book shelves in the book shops are reducing. More space is taken up by toys, coffee mugs and various other related and unrelated accessories.
Digital books have evolved and certainly become much more acceptable. I read more newspapers online than I subscribe to. That kindles the thought again.
