Of Kindles and Scribbles

I was originally opposed to ebooks because I loved the feel (and smell) of real books. But, as I approached the end of high school and began preparing to do an English degree, I thought that having an eReader would mean I wouldn’t have to carry so many books around all. So, a year ago, I got a Kindle for my birthday.

I loaded it up with everything on Project Gutenberg that I’d heard of, and bought what books for my first university English class were available. It got a lot of use over that first semester, but I came across some problems with it which meant that I think, overall, eReaders in their current form just aren’t suitable for that purpose. Even though the editions I had mostly had page numbers that were supposed to match with the physical editions my classmates had, finding the passages we were reading in lectures and tutorials proved pretty much impossible.

One of the things which convinced me to get a Kindle (alongside the space saving and Project Gutenberg) was that I thought it might make annotating books easier. Unfortunately, the annotation system on the Kindle is a mere add-on that is very poorly conceived. The system offers no easy way of searching notes. The annotations you make can be found if you’re on that page of the book (and flicking through isn’t possible), or completely removed from all context in a text file or on the Amazon website. As such, Kindle annotations offer no advantage whatsoever over annotating physical books.

But wait! I hear you saying. You mean you write on your books!? Blasphemy! How can you say you love books when you destroy them?

I’ve actually seen this sort of reaction on other blogs, where someone’s been showing something cool that they or someone else has made out of a book and people are telling them that clearly they don’t really like books at all, or they wouldn’t be able to do something like that to them.

Yes, I write in my books. Sometimes, I use pen. My blog posts often start in the margins of whatever I’m reading. For instance, here’s the beginning idea of my post on Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence as it was first conceived at around 1am:

I think there’s probably a lot of overlap between people who don’t like ebooks and people who are scandalised by people writing in books or using them to make art. Both involve an emphasis on the book as an object, rather than on the content inside.

For me, what matters most about a book is the text (including visual elements of that text, of course) that it contains. The text is what carries ideas, and those ideas are what makes literature so valuable. Whether you discover those ideas on a screen or in a giant leather-bound volume is irrelevant. Obviously there is pleasure to be gained from books that are beautiful in themselves, and I have found myself migrating back to physical books this semester, once I stopped using the Kindle for my school texts. The main reason why I’m increasingly preferring to buy physical books rather than read them on my Kindle or get them from the library is so that I can annotate them, which is particularly important for the books that I blog about.

It may seem a bit conceited, but I generally feel that I’m adding to rather than depreciating the value of a book when I write in it. Sure, I look back at the annotations I made a year ago and they seem horrendously stupid, but what they lack in insight into the text they make up for in insight into my past self, which is valuable as long as the book remains mine. And when I buy books second-hand I’ll always get the most scribbled on copy I can find, because it’s fun to see what others thought about what I’m reading (even if most of it’s inane), and because I find annotated books to be more beautiful as objects than their pristine counterparts. So, yes, I guess I do value books as objects as well as the texts they contain. But I’m keeping my Kindle, because it lets me buy books for less than a dollar when I’m on the train.