Posted on July 7, 2010 by Brizzieblog
The advent of electronic books and electronic readers has every book lover torn with conflicting emotions.
On the one hand is the tantalising promise of thousands of one’s favourite books being instantly available at the touch of a screen. These books will never suffer from yellowing, loose pages or worst of all, getting lost after you commit the folly of loaning a precious book to an absent-minded friend.
On the other hand, I can’t imagine not having the dilemma of figuring out how to fit new arrivals on my crowded bookshelves, or the pleasure of picking up and leafing through a treasured gift, old friends like a Folio edition of The Scarlet Pimpernel or re-reading a pungent little Penguin classic that I’ve owned for 20 years, titles like The Quiet American or Emma.
And I can’t imagine book club being quite the same when everyone arrives with their iPad with the book we’ve chosen preloaded, probably linked to erudite book reviews, so that everything we might want to discuss is already deconstructed in neat, convenient bytes.
If my bias is already obvious, it should be understandable given I am in the demographic of first generation Internet user (which is a nice way to say I’m in my 40s).
Reading and talking about books is such an obvious pleasure that it does not require further justification. If e-books make the written word more accessible to people, then I can offer no valid argument against this new media.
And yet I am glad I grew up in the age when the printed word was king. Just as in this century we are witnessing the disappearance of great newspapers and the decline of the best journalism, I worry that books and publishing are changing forever.
Apart from reading a book, there is also the great pleasure in hunting for a special book. Our book club of friends met the other night to talk about beautiful book, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by writer and poet Laurie Lee. There were only five of us at book club, and we each took a different route in our search for this out-of-print classic.
In my case, I failed, as usual, to track down the book through the Brisbane City Council Library. My new iPad was equally useless – Free Books, iBooks and an assortment of other e-collections landed me at frustrating dead ends. Big Brother Google and First Cousin Amazon pointed me to really expensive booksellers who would have taken weeks to deliver it, probably from a Walmart-sized warehouse.
Mary Ryan’s and Borders did not have the book listed on their catalogues. I discovered there was a copy in the Griffith Uni library but my daughter was too busy to borrow the book for me. Eventually I drove into Brisbane (where you pay more to park than for your shopping), parked in a suspect car park where I risked getting towed away, and dashed into one of the best second hand bookshops in Brisbane, Archives Fine Books. The gods of literature were smiling on me: I was rewarded for my persistence by spotting the slim, yellowed paperback misfiled on the shelf above “L”.
The people at Archives really love books, and they shared in the pleasure of my discovery by informing me that this book had only arrived day or two before. I am always amazed they know things like that because they profess to having one million books in their Charlotte Street treasure trove. I paid $10 for the book.
Among our group, one of the stalwarts, Cathy, happened to have the book on her book shelf while Stacey had the luxury of choosing between two different editions at Bent Books, both going for $5. She emailed us this good news, but maddeningly the second copy was sold before the rest of us could get there. Another of our group, Diana, who can’t come to meetings at the moment, lent her precious copy to Shelly, who returned it to Diana because she had promised it to Stacey. So Shelly made a special trip to Novel Lines in Paddington, and the bookshop owner promised to get the book out of storage and deliver it to her. After an anxious wait of a week or so, Shelly finally got her copy of the book.
But the best find was Jennifer’s. She had a particularly successful Google search and found a copy online from a second-hand bookshop in Cooma, New South Wales. She paid $9 plus postage and received a beautiful, hard cover edition, original dust cover intact.
And the joy of the hunt was only the beginning. This wonderful book, published in 1969 by the author of Cider with Rosie, is near perfect writing. Lee paints a picture of a desperately poor but stunning country, of uncompromisingly realistic people facing the inevitability of war. Every page is a marvellous account of Lee’s solo walk around Spain – of what it is like to own nothing and yet be the luckiest, most adventurous person alive.
I hope we don’t lose priceless $10 paperbacks in our new e-book age. In case we do, you should get a copy of Laurie Lee’s wonderful book.