This week I ate lots of take away, football got cancelled and I didn’t make the gym. However I did nesting, running and swimming. I have no idea how much weight I have gained (lost isn’t an option) as I haven’t got to my ‘baselined’ scales. I did gain 60 pounds but they were pounds sterling on a dubious flop that had me dealt 4 bullets on the river (now go and look it up). I celebrated maturely by cutting cards for shots of Polish Bison Grass vodka. All in all, health wise I’m a mess. So instead of the normal here’s a rant about new (ish) technology instead.
Anyone watching UK television recently will have noticed a mass advertising campaign. A man has what looks like a giant iPhone in his hand and a close up reveals he is reading a book using Amazon Kindle – an e-reader. Cut to long shot of a man and woman on deck chairs on the beach both with said machine. As these things become more popular a dissenting voice (mine) must be heard.
I’m far from a Luddite. My job involves selling software upgrades and the improved business processes that result to one of the most intransigent industries on the planet. I was an early adopter of Social Networks. I deal daily in change. My objection to Kindle is not, therefore, based on progress but rather on snobbery and a love of people watching. I admit this up front.
Commuting by train as I do 3 or 4 times a week can be immensely revealing about people. It’s not just the polite versus the selfish, the suited versus the dressed down or the chatterer versus the introvert (or sleeping). A broad sense of people’s tastes and views can be gained by a small amount of careful observation of what is pulled out to read. On the way up to Town it could be a free Metro (too stingy to buy the Express), the Daily Mail (likely to be scared every time an Asian male boards the train), the Telegraph (senior manager or board member / partner with the tolerance level of a Rottweiler), The Guardian (sandal wearing GLBT on a muesli comedown) or the Sun (likes pictures of tits in the morning, and I don’t mean small winged animals). You see what I’ve done there? Managed to attribute a lazy stereotype* to everyone on the train based solely on choice of newspaper. How the heck am I supposed to do that if everyone starts reading a homogonous black tablet that looks like a giant i-Phone? I’ll actually have to start reading my copy of the Times (intelligent and politically balanced of course!) instead of people watching.
If not a paper then many commuters reach for their book at some point during their round trip. Books expand yet further upon a person’s tastes and views. It’s possible to observe the mainstream shift from Dan Brown to Stieg Larsson or find a kindred spirit buried in a De Bernieres, Dalrymple or Bourdain. Is the guy in the rumpled suit a commuting professor or down on his luck? If he’s reading Dostoevsky it makes my observation far easier. Look at Mr Cool with the shades, Blackberry and Armani. Why is he reading Harry Potter?! And there seems to be a law that states every commuter train in the South East of England must contain at least one John Grisham paperback or the train will be stopped and made to go on the slow line.
That may be as far as it goes in uptight repressed England but to see the true impact of Kindle think about somewhere altogether more literary and less repressed. Like, say, Dublin. I worked there for 3 months and one Friday checked in early for my flight home as was my wont. With a couple of hours to kill I naturally headed to the bar. Not for a Guinness – the last bar you’ll drink at in Dublin doesn’t serve it (or didn’t in 2007) – but I had a pint of Beamish and pulled out my copy of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. The bar was quiet and before I knew it the barman had noticed the book and sidled over for a chat. “That’s a great book” he said (or something of the kind) and before I knew it we’d had a long conversation about growing up in Ireland in the 50s, the quality of Bryson’s writing, Americans and why you couldn’t get that last pint of Guinness. A solitary pint turned in to a genuinely interesting and engaging conversation. Would that have happened if I had pulled out an e-reader? “Aha I see you have the new E21C with extra RAM” he might have said, resulting in me heading for the far corner of the bar and downing my Beamish in 10 seconds flat.
I’m not strictly a bibliophile. Though I can see the value in first editions, cover art, the smell of a book etc they are not in themselves obsessions. However, if we are all to Kindle, how an earth can I make a snap judgement about peoples intellectual capacity or find out how the barman serving me seduced Mary from Navan in 1958?
*of course I know these are lazy stereotypes. Lots of different people read the Sun, Telegraph, Guardian or Mail. Everyone picks up a Metro now and again. But how would I know even that if they Kindled, huh? Huh?
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