Retail therapy: My Kindle

The other day I felt so crappy, I decided I needed to exercise my consumer muscle and acquire a toy to cheer myself up. So, with many mixed feelings, I ordered a Kindle, which has finally become available in Canada, something like the last country on the planet allowed to purchase it. It arrived at my door less than 24 hours later.

My feelings continue to be mixed. The pluses that motivated me to use an e-reader are certainly there: no awkward holding a heavy or poorly bound book above my face in bed, wrist aching, pages turning unbidden; no trees killed for my reading pleasure; no additions to my already bulging bookshelves. I also bought a nice leather case in which it can stand upright on my kitchen table so I can read while I eat (normally a frequent and favourite pastime, though I'm not eating much these days).

But the thought of abandoning the physical book altogether makes my heart ache. Whenever I recall a book, I see it in my mind's eye, the design of the cover, the typeface chosen just for that book, the layout of the pages. Now, when I recall a book I've read on the Kindle, what will distinguish it from any other? Similarly, I tend to remember roughly where in a book a particular passage occurred, and can often relocate it based on that memory: about three-quarters of the way through, say, at the end of a paragraph in the upper right corner of the two-page spread. That's not possible on the e-reader, though the device makes it pretty easy to mark a page or highlight a passage even if a pen is not handy.

I also miss the ability to pass along a book to another reader, though I've always had mixed feelings about that, too, since doing so may prevent another sale for the writer.

And what about the sublime experience of book-shopping? Will I simply spend those browsing hours in Chapters or an independent bookstore, soaking in the gorgeous array of what's available, and then go home and give my dollars to Amazon? I guess so.

I now have a reputation in my family as the aunt who gives only books as presents, and I'd like to continue to do so, but already one other family member has a Kindle: I think I will miss the pleasure of choosing a volume for him, new and unique in its appearance, heft and smell, and I think I would miss receiving such gifts, too.

Still, I don't have room for any more books in my house. Or magazines, for that matter. I'm the kind of person who buys magazines to read long, grey articles; I don't respond much to the visuals. So for the most part, I don't mind reading magazines online. But, having worked in magazines for decades, I'm more aware than the average reader of how much goes into making magazines look beautiful, even down to my job of ensuring that the type has been laid out without great gaps or weird endings. Online, none of that matters; the shape of the type is endlessly malleable as you resize the pages for your own convenience.

Every so often, even I encounter an article that needs pictures to work: this week I read a terrific piece in The Atlantic (November issue), about the grassroots housing developments springing up in New Orleans, that wouldn't have worked so well without photos. Of course, in the online version, you can see even more visuals than you could in the print magazine, but I'm guessing the same would not be true on the Kindle version (which is why a single issue costs just $2.99); it doesn't have a colour screen, in any case.

Which leads me to the complaint I wasn't expecting to make: I find the Kindle screen a little unpleasant to look at because it's so grey. I thought it would be white or off-white or cream, like most book pages. As it is, I can read it just fine, but I have a constant nagging feeling that a light should be coming back on, like my laptop screen when it's dimmed for energy-saver mode. I had to laugh at Ian Brown's disparaging review of the Kindle in The Globe and Mail, in which he describes being surprised that he can't read it in the dark. I wonder if I'll ever get used to the screen.

What has surprised me is that I much prefer reading The Globe and Mail on the Kindle to my online subscription. The recent revamping of the Globe's website seems like a disaster to me: it's not nearly as easy to search as the old one; I get a less-comprehensive daily email notification than before, and half the time the links don't work; signing in has become confusing. But even without those glitches, an online newspaper works on hyperlinks and is continually updated, so although I may get linked in all kinds of interesting directions, I always come away from reading the "paper" online feeling like I haven't read the whole paper. Because I'm old-school, that matters to me.

But on the Kindle, the experience of reading the Globe is very linear. You can start at the beginning and click through every article in the paper until you get to the end, much as you would browse the physical item. (You can also access it by section.) My pre-Web soul -- my need for things to come in neatly delineated packages -- finds this satisfying, even though I suppose I'm missing out on the interesting distractions the Web version can provide.

Meanwhile, I have dozens of books lying around my house that I want to read, so I suppose the Kindle will gather dust, unless I feel so rich that I can spend the $12 U.S. to replace each paper copy with an e-version. Just my luck I'll recover fully from my cancer treatment and live to need my money! I may well, however, spend the three bucks it costs to get Jane Austen's entire oeuvre, which, I'm only a little embarrassed to say, I don't actually own in hard copy, and most of which, I'm very embarrassed to say, I haven't read.