Sunday salon - e-books vs 'real' books

Happy Easter everyone! I thought I would honour the long weekend (several days late, as it happens - sorry about that!) with an appropriately significant discussion: the Big One, or at least a part of it. I have been thinking about this topic for a long time, but was initially reluctant to visit it here because I have so many complicated feelings about e-books and I know that these emotions will likely get in the way of any objectivity I might lend to the topic. There are a lot of different discussions to be had about e-reading but here I want to talk about preferences - whether I prefer, and whether you prefer, reading electronically or on paper.

Here's the thing: I get mad when people tell me print books are dying. It upsets me because the physical books that I own are probably my most treasured material possessions (after family photographs). I have been collecting books since I can remember. I still own the books I read as a child, my Enid Blytons and Joan Aikens and Judy Blumes, and I can't wait to share these with my own children. The thought of sitting Iggy in my lap and reading to him from my old edition of The Magic Faraway Tree fills my heart with joy. My brother still owns the treasured hardback copies of The Hardy Boys series that my father kept from his own childhood, and which my brother and I both tore through voraciously when we were young. Bibliohubby knows that if he wants to get me a special gift, hunting down a signed first edition of one of my favourite books is guaranteed to bring a giddy smile to my face. When I was at University, my room had piles of books teetering in every corner of the room, and I returned from every bookshop sale laden with yet more brown bags of books. Numerous men over the years have loudly complained whilst helping me move about the sheer number of boxes filled with brick-like tomes that they were required to carefully shift from one apartment to another. And as you all know, one of the things I love to do whilst traveling is visiting bookshops in the towns we visit, perusing the shelves to see whether there is a treasure somewhere, waiting to be found.

The walls of our living room are lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves, and there are bookshelves also in the study, the bedroom and the nursery. And the kitchen has a special shelf for cookbooks.

Books are precious to me.

So it might seem odd that I was one of the early adopters of the e-reader. I was thrilled to get an Amazon Kindle for Christmas when they first came out, five or so years ago. Our family is spread all over the world and we have always traveled. After too many trips lugging kilograms of books from country to country, loathe to part with them even once they had been read, I could see the appeal of a single device that allowed me to carry more books than ever before with no additional weight. It was a matter of practicality.

Over the years, I have developed greater appreciation for the e-reader and the e-book. Electronic reading is convenient for travel, yes, that assumption has been borne out, but even at home I have now started reading e-books. My new Kindle with its backlight makes for particularly convenient night-time reading. The Kindle app allows me to check in and read on my phone when I have nothing with me at all, no book, no e-reader (I should add that these moments are rare, as my habit of carrying a book everywhere I went started when I was very young  - you never know when you might be caught in a queue). The one-click page-turn saves me from needing two hands to read, a real bonus when I am also cooking, for example, or breastfeeding (which will soon be a concern all over again). And now that I am reviewing books, it is handy to be able to highlight sections and draft notes as I read, without needing to pull out a pen or a pencil and mark up delicate pages.

I also had a breakthrough a few weeks ago that I am loathe to admit here. I was reading Ian McEwan's new book, Sweet Tooth, which I had pre-ordered in hardback from Amazon. Because I was under pressure to read it quickly for a book club, I also purchased an e-book copy so that I could be sure I would have it with me wherever I was. After doing most of the reading electronically, I picked up the hardback on the weekend to finish it off. And... I found it very uncomfortable. The hardback was large and unwieldy and difficult to hold. It had a dustcover which kept coming loose and, being very pregnant at the moment, this was particularly frustrating when I lay on my bed to read, trying to find a position that was both comfortable for my belly and comfortable for holding the book. My hand got tired and after a while I ended up switching back to the e-reader. Outrageous!!

I have to say that this is really only a problem, though, with a hardback book, or with what I call 'the new hardback', those hardback-sized paperbacks that are too large to fit in a handbag (honestly, what is the point? What were you thinking, publishers??). Or, as fellow book- and lifestyle-blogger Trish (from Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity) points out, paperback tomes that are 1000+ pages. I have recently started reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and I don't think I would done so this year if it had required me to carry that massive book around with me. The ideal paper book for comfy reading is flexible and small enough to hold in one hand and fit in a regular-sized handbag. Given the choice, I would always prefer to read a real book in this kind of paperback form than an e-book.

But I have so many books in my collection that there is really no need for me to own copies of every book I now read. For example, I feel no desire these days to own copies of the lighter reads I pick up, the chick lit and romance I might read on a beach holiday. Novels that I am interested in from a literary perspective, books that stay with me, which might merit a re-read later in life - these are a different story. I still like to own them on paper, even if I have first read them electronically.

I was surprised to find that this behaviour, which I had wondered about and considered strange, is in fact consistent with the patterns of most e-readers. Digital bestseller lists are dominated by genre novels, like romance and thrillers. Like me, people tend to read 'airport fiction' on e-readers, but they still read literary fiction in paper form.

Interestingly, Nicholas Carr of the Wall Street Journal suggests that the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon would not have happened without e-books, because reading electronically allowed people, who otherwise might have been embarrassed to be seen reading the trilogy, to do so in public with no-one the wiser. So there is another benefit of an e-reader: public privacy, as it were.

But the results of a study done by Pew Research Centre earlier this year found that almost 90% of e-readers also continue to read physical volumes. I was very pleased to hear this. In other words, it is not that e-reading is replacing paper reading, but rather that the two seem to be co-existing - for now - and serving different purposes for the same people, as they do for me. E-reading is a complement to paper reading, much like audio books.

So there you have it. E-reading, thus far, has added to our reading options, rather than reducing them. As for me? I prefer e-books for travel, and for the purpose of reading genre fiction or 'big' books. Literary fiction, books that I treasure, I prefer to own in hard copy - either immediately or after first reading them electronically and discovering how much I love them. And for collecting? I prefer signed first-edition hardbacks, please!

What about you? Do you prefer the ease of an e-reader? Have you succumbed so completely to this new technology that you now read e-books exclusively? Or are you a traditionalist who refuses to pick up an e-reader? Or do you, like me, prefer one or the other depending on the book and the time? I am curious about other people's reading habits, so drop me a line and let me know!