A mere 11 days after the launch of Alzheimer’s: a Love Story, books are very much on my mind. Two days post launch, Sweetheart Vivienne and I visited our friend Irene who’d been given an Amazon Kindle for her recent birthday. I’d heard and read of the Kindle, but I’d never seen let alone used one. So I was intrigued when Irene started it up and let us play with it. She’d downloaded one book (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, if you’re curious). New things are hard to adapt to, especially for an old guy like me. I think I absorb stories and information better when I read from paper I hold in my hands – be it a book or a pile of A4 pages. Recently I volunteered to read a draft manuscript novel written by Sweetheart Vivienne’s writing colleague, and our friend, Jane. As I expected, I received it as a Microsoft Word file attached to an email. Yesterday I read half of it. It felt oh so strange reading it on my computer screen. I longed to hold a paper version in my hands, to feel the pages, to smell them, to hear their sound as I leafed through them. Michael Dell and Bill Gates denied me that privilege this time. But after Jane’s book’s published, as I think and hope it will be, I’ll do so then. But will I ever get used to books in electronic form? Who knows? As I wrote here, I love the smell of books and bookshops. And as I wrote yesterday, the internet was once anathema to me, but now it’s second nature. Time will tell.
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