I have a Kindle. I came late into the game, being resistant to the idea of e-books. Now that I have one, I am both persuaded by it and more forcefully opposed to it than before. But to begin with, let me acknowledge how useful it can be (or was, on one occasion).

A while ago, I was asked to do a review for the Irish Times on the latest John Connolly book, The Burning Soul. The Irish Times put the review copy in the post and sent it to my address in northern Italy. But I waited for three weeks and the book never arrived. By now I was preparing to return to Rome, and I might have asked them to send me another copy there, but time was running short. A final check of my post on the morning of my departure brought me a gas bill, but no book.

Waiting in the middle of the countryside for the first of the three trains that would bring me on my long 500-mile journey back to Rome, I took out my Kindle and downloaded Connolly’s book. By the time I had got back to Rome, I was three quarters of the way through it. The following day I finished the book, and the day after I did the review, and sent it in just in time. That was my first and very propitious use of the Kindle. If you are stuck in a rural district and you need a book for work purposes, then the Kindle’s your man. But since this is a peripheral benefit that I had not anticipated, and since the tone of this blog entry is still anti-Kindle, why did I buy the damned thing to begin with?

I bought it for two reasons. Let’s start with the plausible-sounding one that I like to I tell serious people (and my wife). An author who repudiates this remarkable new form of publishing is being willful and pretentious. Whether we like it or not, e-books are here to stay. If an author refuses to accept them and what they signify, s/he is failing to accept with the world as is, and rejecting the legitimacy of a format that the public seems determined to adopt. This is a frightfully haughty (i.e. bad) stance for a purportedly creative person to take. A writer determined to succeed must embrace the new technology. By this logic, the Kindle was not an impulse purchase, but a compulsory investment, and until I have such wealth that my wife doesn’t even notice that I just spent my son’s shoe money, this is the line of argument I’ll be using.

The second reason, the real one about which the wife knows nothing -- she is Italian and can’t read this, is that I was in an airport and, having no interest in perfumes and having already bought a very large Toblerone, I naturally gravitated towards the only other sort of store that I find interesting, the one selling music and electronics. Except they don’t really sell music anymore and I already have an MP3 player. I was nonetheless drawn in by the Apple iPhones but, because I have a political conscience and shreds of personal dignity, I could not bring myself to buy one. By now aching to make an extravagant buy that was unconnected to Steve McJobs, I found the only thing left was a Kindle. So I bought one. Then I had the nice young salesman set it up and register it to the WRONG Amazon store (no, you can’t change the setting, not really).

(As for the possibility of splashing out on books, well I was flying Ryanair, and everyone knows that Ryanair planes crash and incinerate everyone inside if anyone boards it with more than 25 grams of luggage - hence the heightened vigilance of their courteous staff. Since the Boeing 737-800 is known to be incapable of carrying any extra weight whatsoever, buying a book is essentially a form of terrorism, which would make me no better than a Muslim with a toenail clipper or a Tamil with undeclared toothpaste).

Since then, I have downloaded other books on to the Kindle. I tend to download the sort of books I would prefer people not to know I read, and it turns out this is a common practice. So what is the problem? I have two objections to the Kindle, but I am kind of boring myself a little now, so I think I’ll mention just one of them.

My first objection is that an electronic book is a digital creation and, because I am old and full of sleep, I believe that what is digital is also provisional. The digital format suits an ongoing project or a work in progress. The defining characteristic of a digital text, such as this blog, is that it is amenable to amendment. I regard the digital file I create on my computer as part of the input stage. The unchangeable published book is the finished product, the output. For this reason, an e-book, for me, belongs to an indeterminate space surrounded by contingency. It lacks definitiveness and definition because it is so open to revision. Semiotically, these are all interesting qualities, but they make it harder for me to suspend disbelief, to close my critical mind, to stop looking for typos, errors and infelicitous phrasing that might still be corrected. For these reasons, an e-book seems more like a text book, course work or an object of study. Reading becomes almost a task rather than a pleasure.

My second objection is almost moral – but I think I’ll save it for my next blog entry.