To Kindle or not To Kindle in 2024

The Amazon Kindle turned fifteen years old at the end of 2023 – sorry if that makes anyone feel ancient – and I have still not bought one or asked someone else to buy me one.

When they first emerged onto the market I was absolutely enraged and appalled – how DARE the publishing industry be further undermined by the very retailer that has impoverished and destroyed so many bookshops in this country and abroad, with this soulless little thing that could sit in a drawer, andno one would even KNOW that you read books! I mean, imagine!

Bear in mind, I feel like 2007 was the very height of everyone having a unit in the lounge full of DVDs that cost 3 for £45 in HMV (remember those days?! I do!), a huge rack of CDs and a Hi-Fi that played them, along with a pine bookcase full of old books as well. Minimalism was not, as far as I observed then, even remotely A Thing. So why on earth would this weird little Bezos-Baby monstrosity be of any use to anyone?

Then as years rolled by, I realised my elderly relatives, now passed, were able to read because of having aKindle, and it was the only thing that enabled them to keep doing so, because old shaky hands and old achy joints couldn’t hold heavy books and turn pages. So fine, I admitted with enormous reluctance,maybe it had its place in the world amongst the elderly and otherwise infirm, which at the time didn’t include me.

I did have a vast collection of DVDs and CDs back in the day, and apart from some sentimental favourites that live in the loft, they have all been replaced with streaming services that somehow contain thousands of box sets and movies in our millimetre-thin flat screen TV, and the Spotify app that lives in my tiny phone. The racks have gone to the car boot sale, a decade or more ago. The publishing industry was chronically undermined anyway – me not buying a Kindle did not in any way negate the effects of the millions of others who did.

The one thing I have still insisted on having is my books. My husband and I were incredibly fortunate and managed to buy a house with lots of living space last year, in which I could have a workspace and wall-to-wall books, if I wanted. I decided I didn’t want – I’ve kept some real treasures, some favourites, some books that I think our entire household will benefit from having around and my immaculately-kept, still-growing-if-I’m-honest Penguin Clothbound Collection arranged lovingly around a second-hand pianoand a bright yellow chair to read them in. But I’ve decided to do away with my 800 other fiction paperbacks, collections of plays I’ll never read or study again, excess cookbooks because let’s be honest, we all go on the BBC Good Food website when we’re cooking stuff. Relentless, indiscriminate acquisition of books is no longer my desire – but continuing to read still is.

Things have changed a bit. I’m in my thirties, a homeowner, a mum, and I’ve got mad into Minimalism YouTube videos who say stuff like, ‘Your things are like your roommates, only you pay their rent.’ I am, like everyone else, working full-time and yet still spectacularly broke – thanks, Cost-of-Tory crisis. A perfect condition paperback identical to the ones on the shelves in Waterstones selling for £9.99 go for 10p-20p on Music Magpie or Ziffit. Maybe you’d get 50p for it if you could be bothered to get up at 4am and do a boot sale on a cold, windy Sunday morning. If my books have no resale value and I haven’t got space to store them and I definitely can’t afford to buy every single book I want to read at full price, it does present a bit of conundrum.

The obvious solution here is called a LIBRARY – and we have one, in our village, and dozens more across the county of Essex. I love to take my daughter to the library and take out even more books for to enjoy on top of the at least 50+ books she already has, and I’ve got a few out long-term myself right now. Any and all new fiction, old fiction, give-it-a-go non-fiction I can get from there; enjoy it, return it, problem solved.

But there’s a new caveat to this. I’m an author myself now, and a massive hypocrite of one too. All I want is people to buy my book in vast quantities – paperback, ideally, because I get more royalties and can maybe scrape out of my tortured-artist, inevitable creative-person poverty. So what kind of person am I if I’m trying to dodge buying other people’s books and affording them the same financial benefit? It’s allvery complicated.

So in truth I don’t know what to do still. Hypocrisies are rife in this majorly first-world-problems dilemma. I said farewell to a rack full of CDs after confidently claiming for years that I would ‘ALWAYS bethe sort of person that still buys CDs.’

Nope. Got a Premium Duo Spotify account with my husband and not a single device I own now plays CDs.

Are my books my last holdout? Yes, I suspect they are.