Here is a myth-shattering bit of personal information; despite being a writer by profession, I only go to a book store to attend live jazz sessions, browse through Nintendo games, colourful Chinese pencils and over-priced notebooks. As much as I love hanging around one sole aisle stacking books in my favourite genre of literature, I confess that such an act is solely to understand how an average man with the habit of reading Steinbeck, looks. The reason I have stopped going to a book store for books is because I have stopped buying physical books. I prefer downloading spineless versions quietly onto my iPod in the loo and then reading them in the train. The book shop is now mobile and the possibility to buy a book just about anywhere is real.

The first e-book reader I ever laid my hands on was my aunt’s Sony reader. In a fancy leather case (with an in-built reading lamp), the reader displayed various shades of grainy grey letters. While it was in one word fascinating, the excitement died when she demonstrated how the case was separate and took the reader out of it. Standing naked, it looked like a cross between a short greying man and a digitised slate. For once, I was rather happy that I couldn’t afford one; anything without a minimum 480-by-320-pixel resolution didn’t cut it in my technicoloured brain. The Johannes Gutenberg of e-book readers happens to be Amazon, an American company that has already launched three of its version of readers in the States. Kindle, Kindle2 and Kindle DX have now crossed over to become the principal verb to describe e-book reading.

While fans point to pictures of white-collared Americans holding on for safety with one hand, and with the other paging forward-and-reverse on the Kindle reading their favourite book(s) on the subway, an old-school skeptic argues how he is tired of staring at screens all-day-and-night long. Kindle offers newspapers too and to save them, the papers are now striking deals, offering customer subscriptions. Kindle books aren’t transferable. They are closed clusters of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its owner. It helps not to have more books than furniture in one’s house and I am convinced that for the true ‘reader worms’ it also means more living space as opposed to a bookworm. As Amazon wallowed in the grief of missing out on a backlight which makes it impossible to read in a dark room, the Kindle app for iPhones and iPods promises brightly-lit books. Apple, known to take stylish technological leaps, finally offers a nine-inch reading screen and a 1024-by-768-pixel resolution, alongside the usual iPod-plus-internet-plus-applications package.

We will miss sepia-toned, moth-eaten literary relics but surely back in 1440 even as the printing press churned up multiple copies, there might have been some angry handwritten manuscripts on the evil of mass literature production. And yet, as the cynics point out, an e-reader is in no way more environmentally friendly than cutting a tree for a bunch of pages. Not sure if Nostradamus was in on the reading-future, but in 1899 HG Wells, in The Sleeper Awakes, spoke of the entire body of human literature reduced to a mini-library of ‘peculiar double cylinders’ that would be viewable on a screen. The idea of a Project Gutenberg, (the oldest digital library founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, in Mississippi, USA, claimed, as of December 2009, over 30,000 items in its collection) implies waiting a while and experiencing the ever-growing simplicity of the e-reading realm. Here’s a proposition: wouldn’t it be absolutely fabulous to someday imagine a 3D e-book or magazine? Imagine reading Verve with fashion pop-ups or even better with a Verve Man popping up as you ‘virtually’ turn the page....

Subscribe to Verve Magazine or buy the Verve issue on stands now!