Kindles make reading people harder

If you need another reason to worry about the death of print, think of the access to strangers' souls we'll lose when e-readers take over.
by: Sarah Crown

Do you need to know anything more about these people? Harry Potter fans from two generations at a bus stop. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Ah ha! I've finally put my finger on a concrete reason for my lingering, irrational, doubtless soon-to-be-jettisoned prejudice against e-readers. I had dinner last night with a few people at the Edinburgh festival, and eventually, inevitably, the subject of print vs ebooks came up. The pros and cons were duly trotted out for another airing, and the conversation followed the usual, now well-worn lines, until one member of the party made what seemed to me to be a killer point.


"The problem with Kindles," he said, "is that you can't tell what other people are reading on public transport."

Case closed. Spying on what everyone else on the bus is reading is my main source of entertainment on the way into work in the morning. Train journeys are enlivened by trying to sneak a look at the cover of the book the person opposite is buried in, without them spotting what I'm doing. One of my favourite internet destinations is the People Reading blog which posts pictures of the denizens of San Francisco, with their latest reading material; a prize, meanwhile, to anyone who can reunite me with a blog I used to visit a few years back written by a woman somewhere in north America, who used to clock not only the title but the page of books bypassers were reading, nip into the nearest bookshop, track down book and page and transcribe what she found there.

Rubberneckers of the world, unite: when ebooks take over, how will we form snap judgments about our fellow-travellers? Think about it.


from: Guardian