To Kindle or not to Kindle?

Over my long, busy yet somehow unproductive festive break I was introduced to my first e-reader. A friend had received a Kindle for Christmas and was just getting to grips with its features. Up to now I've been sceptical about e-readers, from the practical considerations of battery life and screen brightness to the aesthetics of a coverless book with no smell of musty paper. I am by no means converted and I still don't see myself rushing out to buy one, but some of my biggest objections were overcome: it kind of 'writes' the page then switches off, so if you're lingering on one page for ages, apparently you're not using the battery, and there was no discernible shine so it didn't feel like reading a screen. It's not that comfortable to hold though - if you're a 'tea in one hand, book in the other' reader like me, what you really want is something with a notch that mimics the v-shape of paperback pages that you rest your thumb between. Or a handle so you can hold it like a lorgnette, maybe.

The other big objection I had was that I love books as well as the stuff that goes in them, it's the same objection I've had to digital-only music. But that's sort of when I had my moment of revelation: there are some albums I must own on vinyl, they are a total sensory experience in themselves, but there are quite a few that I used to have on tape and it didn't bother me because I only wanted to be able to listen to the content. When I was a teenager I had a personal cassette player (I'm not going to call it a walkman because it wasn't, I think it was a Panasonic though that may have been OneMonkey's), so I decided before I set out how many and which tapes I needed, and had to lug them around with me, and if a tape chewed or my mood had changed or I got stuck on a bus in a traffic jam and ran out of tapes I was annoyed. These days I have an MP3 player and I can carry more albums than my strength or rucksack would have allowed back then in something about a third the size of a cassette, and I don't worry about the lack of sleeve notes or cover art because the ones I'm properly bothered about I just listen to on vinyl at home. How many times have I misjudged the number of books I needed on a long train journey and either cursed myself for carrying too many, or run out before journey's end?

However, what about the thrill of the chase - hunting down the last book of the series second-hand? What about second-hand books at all, and the joy of swopping, passing on or passing down (I have a novel which belonged to my 3xgreat grandma and a whole host of my great-uncle's books), feeling the history in the weight of the cover, owning samples of ancestral handwriting in the name written inside or the dedication 'to mother on her birthday'? It just doesn't seem the same to tell someone you think they'd like this book, they should go spend money and download it themselves - one of the great things about lending a friend a book on the offchance they'll enjoy it is that if you've misjudged it they haven't wasted any money and can only curse you for the half-hour they spent wrangling with the first couple of chapters. How long would books be available digitally, would they still go 'out of print' or would they persist somewhere? As at least some of my ancestors were almost certainly Luddites (by which I mean machine-breakers trying to protect their livelihoods, not whatever twisted definition people seem to use for Luddite these days) I feel I should also hold back on the grounds that the people who work at the printer, distribution company, bookshop, paper mill etc would be out of a job if we all went digital.

I'll be sticking to books for the foreseeable future, the same way I stick to vinyl - for the full sensory experience. But don't rule out spotting me on a train with an e-reader in a year or two.