Rekindling your love of the Amazon: perspective one

There is nothing like a freshly printed newspaper, or leafing through the pages of a new book, and yet these are the very things that our modern obsession with technology is threatening to take away. The rise of the e-book is, I think, destroying traditional literary culture. But is this a bad thing? Kindles make reading a book seem cumbersome and are undoubtedly an easier way to read.

Now, with newspaper and magazine subscriptions available on the latest Kindle one begins to wonder what we even need paper copies for. It weighs less than a normal paperback, at under 170 grams, and is advertised as fitting in your pocket. How can we argue with something so convenient?

Since the release of the Kindle, there has been widespread anxiety over the future of the book trade. Amazon seem to be selling the very thing that would make books unnecessary. For those who love the feeling of having the book in their hands in all its material glory, Amazon sell their e-books at a fraction of the retail price, taking sales away from bookstores as readers convert to the Kindle in their droves.

However, with time I’ve become more willing to re-evaluate my perspective. After all we are not the same as previous generations and live in a world where technology is the fundamental lifeline of keeping books alive, even if this is in ways we didn’t expect.

People argue that e-books take away the enjoyment of going to a bookshop and picking out a book, and prevents us from passing that book from person to person. However, I would consider myself a book lover, yet I can’t remember the last time I wandered through the mysterious passageways of a bookshop. I, like most others, have no time. And even if I did browse the shelves for a hidden gem of a book, I could then buy it online for half the price.

We all do it; I for one have brought every one of my courses books online (despite the epic trek to the post office) because it is so much easier. Today, Amazon and e-books provide a way of reading which suits the society we live in and they have captured the target market perfectly. Are we therefore destined to live in an age where online libraries become the norm and our children don’t know what an actual book is? Maybe not. However are we looking at a time where more and more people use the Internet to buy and access books, to the extent that bookshops struggle to retain their place on the high street. Perhaps.

It has to be accepted that e-books are becoming increasingly popular, and are more convenient. Even traditional bookstores such as Waterstone’s are now selling e-books online. It is these kind of moves that suggest that the literary marketplace is changing for, to stay alive, bookshops are endorsing the very things which are destroying them. Maybe soon they will only exist online – if at all.

Certainly this has been the effect on the smaller retailers or family run businesses; rarely today do you see the independent bookshops you used to be able to find everywhere. This in itself is probably one of the biggest downfalls of the rise of the e-book. While some of these smaller bookshops have branched out to the Internet, few remain and the wonderful experience of wandering into an old bookshop is something which will regretfully be long gone.

Many a happy moment has been spent aimlessly absorbing the titles of books lined up along every available space in these delightfully quaint places.

Nonetheless, it is an exciting time for books and publishing despite it being easy to dwell on the negative effects. Books are changing but, increasingly it seems, for the better. By selling books cheaply online, Amazon is actually encouraging people to read. Moreover the Kindle gives you access to over a million free classic books. Technology, while to an extent destroying the traditional ideas of reading, is endorsing a new generation who are reading books they did not before. People who struggled to read or did not read at all now find themselves picking up a Kindle and enjoying the experience of reading. The technology comes with a built in dictionary and adjustable font sizes which makes it the perfect tool for anyone of any age who wants to read.

Today, instead of travelling with ten books in your suitcase (I usually pack more books than clothes when I go on holiday, and never read them all) you can just take a Kindle and have up to 1,400 books at your disposal. You often see people on the tube reading Kindles, instead of carrying a newspaper or book around with them. E-books are great for businesspeople, just as much as they are for the wider public.

E-books are interesting and – more importantly – new. This encourages people to read and publishers to think outside the box. In a society where trying to get a book published is like getting blood out of a stone, the e-book opens up a whole new world for writers and publishers alike.

Publishers over the years have been publishing increasingly small numbers of new authors and the medium of e-books allows for a separate literary forum in which many more writers can be published, ultimately enriching – and making increasingly eccentric – the literary landscape. Perhaps now we can return to what is known as the golden age of publishing, where publishers are willing to take a punt and publish something different and off the wall. Previously, most publishers are just concerned with what they know will sell, not what might sell.

To see the end of the book or the newspaper would of course the worst thing possible. However, this is probably won’t happen. At least not anytime soon, anyway. People love the materiality of books, and they are so cheap online nowadays that there is no reason they cannot live on.

For a book lover, there is something special about flicking the pages of a new book for the first time, or whimsically wondering who has read a used book before it found its way to your hands.

However, it is also important to embrace the technology which makes reading accessible to people from all walks of life and is, in the long run, actually increasing the number of readers and lovers of books.

When the Kindle came out, many were quick to condemn it as the grim reaper of books. In reality, the opposite is true. Books have been given a new lease of life, making the old fashioned idea of literature exciting to people who did not previously read and providing an ever changing world with simple opportunities to keep reading in a modern era where life moves at a continually faster pace.

_sophie.meads@tiscali.co.uk_