Don’t worry, I’ve got no great illusions about it. If you’re reading this article at all, it’s probably because you’ve got to read something. You can’t just gaze into space with your mind in neutral when you’re travelling. There are a lot of us around. I can’t sit at the breakfast table without reading the cornflakes packet or the label on the bottle of HP sauce, and just now, picking up a short story by Somerset Maugham, I discovered he too was a fellow sufferer. ‘I would sooner,’ he says in it, ‘read the catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores or Bradshaw’s Guide [the railway timetable] than nothing at all.’
The story is called The Book-Bag, and it’s about tortured private lives in the 1920s Malayan jungle. But it begins with Maugham’s confession that on his wanderings round the world — and he was a greater traveller than you and I put together — he was a slave to reading: ‘like a dope fiend who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm, I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter.’
He carries them, he says, in a man-sized canvas bag, which porters blench at the sight of. I felt better after reading that, because I’ve always carried far too many books around with me on the same principle. And indeed I’m carrying an absurd amount with me on this trip, because after stopping off here in Dubai, I’m heading on to Afghanistan, and you never know what may happen there. I have 54 books with me: enough to keep me going for at least six months.
But I don’t need a book bag for them. They take up less room than a paperback and fit neatly into my pocket. They’re on one of these newfangled e-readers.
I’ve grown very fond of mine. It’s called a Cool-er, and it’s the size and weight of an envelope containing, say, a birthday card. It stores without apparent effort many of the finest books on Earth.
There are various on the market. Sony does a good one, and I’ve played around with an American one called Kindle, which probably represents the future of the species in that it can also download newspapers and magazines. No doubt we’ll all be doing that sort of thing one day.
I hunt books down in strange places. I catalogue them. I read them endlessly. I go through them greedily in the long winter evenings. I stand in front of them for ages and admire them. They erupt in disorganised heaps in rooms which my wife has designated book-free. Sometimes, I even sell them to make space for more books.
So why should someone to whom the look and feel and even the smell of a book matters, want an e-book rather than the real thing? I suppose because it’s the only way to have a Somerset Maugham-style book bag with me. Maugham says his bag is full of books he’d always wanted to read but never had time to: ‘There were books to read at sea when you were meandering through narrow waters on a tramp steamer, and there were books for bad weather when you had to wedge yourself in your bunk in order not to fall out. There were books chosen solely for their length, which you took with you when you had to travel light...’
The e-reader is the modern equivalent. Of course it’s not a proper book, and it doesn’t feel right but people must have said the same thing when Penguin introduced the paperback in the 30s. They must also have said that paperbacks would be the death of hardbacks.
Is an e-reader a good way to read, say, my favourite novel of all, Tristram Shandy, that crazy, rambling, stream of consciousness from the 1760s? No, it’s a crap way to read it. But without it I probably wouldn’t be able to bring Tristram Shandy with me on this trip, and now I can dip into a page or two any time I like, even when I’m bucketing over bad roads in Afghanistan in a beaten-up car, trying not to think about roadside bombs.
The trouble is, most of the people who design electronic gadgets are techies, not bibliophiles. They make the electronic experience as good as they can, but they don’t seem to have much interest in reading. As a result, the appearance of the text on the screen is awful. The lines are usually not justified, so the boringly presented text looks as though someone’s torn something off the edges.
Many of the companies that publish e-books at present are American, so Trollope and EM Forster talk about things being ‘colored’ or ‘centered’, which looks weird. Sometimes they obviously get the work-experience students to prepare the stuff for downloading, so there are endless spelling mistakes, and every single page of the Chaucer I’ve got from the web is headed ‘The Canterburry Tales’. On my e-reader, the author of both Middlemarch and Sense and Sensibility is mysteriously listed as ‘Kevin’, which I rather like but it might offend others.
Still, these are early days. E-readers will be far better in ten years’ time. People like me who make a living by writing books will look to them to
give us an extra income. How else could you carry a veritable library around with you in a place like Afghanistan? I rest my case.
John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.
