E-books get poor review

Afriend of mine took me aside at our poker game one evening earlier this week and told me how much he was enjoying a book I had lent him a few weeks earlier.

I felt an instant flush of pleasure and gratification that I recognized as being very rare nowadays, because though I recognized the sensation, and its rareness, I really had no idea why I should be feeling it, until I stopped and thought about it for a few moments.

I’ve been a voracious reader all my life, and simply because you’re reading this column, the chances are better than good that you, personally, share my love of good stories, well told. Our individual tastes in what we choose to read and the content of our chosen stories might differ widely, but that is purely personal and those differences fade in the brightness of the love of reading that we share.

I know I can say that with a high degree of confidence, because people who don’t love to read simply don’t read, and so you can safely assume that anyone you see reading and looking comfortable, anywhere, is reading for the pleasure it affords, and for the magic that lies within the power of words.

It was that simple thought, about the power of words, that prompted me to think a little more about that surge of pleasure I had felt just to hear that my friend was enjoying the book I had given him, and I realized, very plainly yet surprisingly, that few things in life have ever given me more pleasure than handing a beloved book over to a friend, to read and make his or her own discovery.

And once I started thinking about that, I began to remember long-forgotten occasions, events and even people whom I hadn’t thought about in years, or even decades.

I can remember giving copies of Taylor Caldwell’s wonderful novel, Dear and Glorious Physician — a fictionalized biography of Luke the Evangelist — to 10 acquaintances over a period of years, and there should probably be a few more names in there that I’ve forgotten. The book went out of print long ago, and soon I had only one copy that I guarded as jealously as any vigilant librarian, keeping careful track of who had it at any given time. It fell apart recently, but I’ve just been able to acquire an almost new copy online, through Abebooks.com, the out-of-print book store in New York.

Another favourite jewel was Leon Uris’s book Mila 18, which was the address of the headquarters of the Jewish Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. I remember giving that book to 12 people over a period of years, eight of whom I lost touch with long ago.

You can’t do that easily today, because like everything else, hardcover books are hugely expensive now.

But you can’t do it at all with the new ebooks, and that has a great deal to do with why I’ve never actually bitten the bullet and bought an E-reader.

Ebooks, to me, are bloodless and impersonal, and believe me, I’ve heard all the arguments pro and contra the various electronic readers and the formats they use.

I have deep-seated reservations about the Amazon Kindle, for example, because they have a proprietorial format, and once you buy a Kindle, you can only buy books for it from Amazon.com.

Any pre-existing books that you bought from a different source, like iBooks, are pretty much lost to you because you can’t read them on Kindle. You have to buy them again from Amazon, in the Kindle format.

That kind of dictatorship offends me, especially when it comes from a company that claims to support book lovers. All my own novels are on line, in all eBook formats, and I have them in my online library, but I never read them electronically. I read the actual books.

As a lifelong bibliophile, it is hard-wired into my belief system that nothing else equates to the solid, comfortable and somehow personal weight of a good book in my hand, and the impersonal aspect of eBooks adds to that belief and amplifies my problems with subscribing to the technology.

You can give someone an eBook as a gift — providing they already own a suitable reading device — but you can never experience that pleasure of lending them a beloved copy from your own eBook library, because it’s not real.

Ebooks don’t come with hard covers and dust jackets and they just don’t feel like, or smell like, books.

In my mind, nothing else smells quite like the innards of a well-thumbed hardcover book, and that peculiar, unique smell is only ever found in old and greatly loved books, those precious, private realms I love to revisit time after time.