Have your book and e-read it too

Just as wine lovers can appreciate a cold beer on a hot day, Kindles and books are not mutually exclusive, writes EOGHAN NOLAN

THERE SEEMS TO BE a commonly held belief that when the courier arrives with your Kindle he is followed up the garden path by four burly men in overalls who take away all your books. Life may present many either/or decisions, but this isn’t one of them.

We live in a house of books. Old books, new books, bestsellers and classics sit cheek-by-jowl with the oddities and the remaindered ones, bargain-table orphans who have become part of the family. In two house moves, the same specialist maker of shelves has been called in to accommodate our tons of tomes, so that around the windows and over the doors every awkward space can be made carry its share of words.

For my part, the collection began in the 1960s when each birthday ritual revolved around a bus journey into town with my mother. It was the annual holy trinity of shops: Scott’s on South Anne Street for the latest in practical jokes; Noblett’s for sweet rock cut from the slab; and, the jewel in the crown, the journey to the hushed basement of Fred Hanna’s to get three new hardback William books. Even then, I must have known that this was the beginning of a collection; I can recall the friendly industrial smell of the solid red hardbacks under their colourful dustjackets as each was carefully inscribed with name, address and the all-important date.

When I first met my wife, one of our early conversations was about the writer Raymond Carver, after whom our first son Carver is named, so even before seeing the inside of her apartment I knew there would be a plentiful supply of books.

Other people’s bookshelves are very revealing and there are few thrills quite as piquant as seeing a favourite book on the shelf of someone you fancy.

After chemistry and literature, the rest was biology. Our books moved in together, married in New York where the binding is nicer and the paper acid-free, and after a while had three little shelves of children’s books. Along the way, just to add to the melee, we developed a fondness for the Folio Society editions you see advertised on the back covers of magazines. Sold four at a time, lavish Folio productions often involve well-known artists, designers and illustrators and come in individual slip cases, making them a pleasure to handle as well as to behold.

Around about the time we had our first child and it became clear we would be spending more time at home with our books, we subscribed to the Signed Firsts Club in the famous Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, from where, for just the cost of the book plus postage, handsome first edition hardbacks of (mostly Southern US) writers arrived every quarter in a box of three.

Each was wrapped in an American Library Association-standard protective mylar jacket complete with the revealing signature of the author to be scrutinised for indications of their personality (no wonder Einstein said that autograph-hunting was the last vestige of cannibalism). The selections are made by Square books for the Signed Firsts Club, and having no choice over what you get is a refreshing way to encounter writers you might pass by in a bookshop. It’s an investment too, if you want to think about it like that – with Ann Patchett, Richard Ford, Edward P Jones and even the elusive Cormac MacCarthy among the writers happy to oblige Square Books.

But the recession combined with receding shelf space put paid to our subscription after several years and several yards of crisp, exotic volumes arriving in the post like gifts from an American cousin.

So how, like a spy in the house of love, does an e-reader fit in here? For many book lovers writing in these pages and elsewhere, e-readers such as Kindles are as popular as the mechanised loom among early 19th-century textile workers. Recently, Edward Stourton described in the Financial Timeshow the Kindle was "a purchase made without pleasure and for weeks it lay unopened in its Amazon box, a sullen presence sulking on my desk".

There's no denying that some books are so perfect in three dimensions you won't want to "reduce" them. Of the six books on the Man Booker Prize 2011 shortlist (the winner is announced today), The Sense of an Endingby Julian Barnes is widely available in a compact and attractive 150-page hardback and is satisfying to hold. Contrast that with AD Miller's Snowdrops which, at a chunky 288 pages with a driving narrative, lends itself perfectly to e-reading.

Yet you can have your book and e-read it too. Just as wine lovers might appreciate a cold beer on a hot day and bicycles don’t make us forget how good a walk can be, Kindle and three-dimensional books are not mutually exclusive. In fact, if you like books, isn’t it brilliant and amazing to think you can now carry more than 3,000 of them under your arm like a newspaper? Besides, some of the advantages of Kindle are less talked about than others.

Reading on an iPad, iPhone, laptop or desktop is not the best experience over a long period as the eye tires from backlit text, akin as it is to having a torch shone at you from behind a page perforated with holes in the shape of the alphabet. Kindle’s electronic ink means it does not have this problem, nor does its screen suffer from glare in the piercing sun of the Irish summer.

That said, the newly launched Kindle Fire, the device hailed not least for its reasonable price as an “iPad killer” has, in its first incarnation, relinquished the advantage of e-ink for the additional benefits of a backlit colour display. Nonetheless, just as it is said the best camera is the one you have with you, the same can be true of a book or any device on which it can be read. Phones are often part of our attire even when there is no pocket, bag or desire to carry a book or a Kindle, and the convenience of having something handy to read is well known to everyone who commutes or queues regularly. Now, by installing the free Kindle app on any device, you can pick up where you left off reading on your Kindle by just “syncing with furthest location”.

I'm currently taken by Luke Sullivan's Thirty Rooms to Hide in: Addiction, Insanity and Rock'n'Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic, the alternately comic and tragic story of a boy growing up with an alcoholic father. If I decide not to bring the Kindle with me, or if I forget it, I can instantly resume reading on the iPhone, iPad or Macbook, one of which is always to hand. Never having seen a physical copy of Sullivan's book, I don't miss it and it won't cry out for precious shelf space.

This remote syncing is one of those simple technological functions that stimulate a response you know is the same your ancestor once had to fire.

Another Kindle edge seldom mentioned: who among us has not come across a word we do not understand? Imagine being able to point at the word on the page and have a dictionary definition appear above it instantly. That’s just what happens when you move the Kindle’s cursor to any word whose meaning eludes you. Also worth mentioning is the fact that with a Kindle, every book can become a large-print version for those with impaired vision or just larger print for those who haven’t accepted the need for reading glasses. (You can also read newspapers, including The Irish Times, on it.)

Too many people seem to think that embracing an e-reader means we’ll all suddenly be living in cheerless minimalist pods made of steel and glass, eating food pills and practising strange salutes. But Kindle and its like are not some Trojan-horse devices that will surreptitiously destroy our shelves or the pleasure we take in well-made books. Coffee tables will not be given over to coffee alone, nor shelves relinquished to knick-knacks. The room is big enough for every reading preference.

Eoghan Nolan is an advertising creative director