Why I won't give up on books

My friend Caroline wrote this great wee piece about why she is a Kindle convert a while back, and I’ve been meaning to write a response to it for a while, but just haven’t got round to it till now. It’s not that I disagree with it – having become an iPad convert myself, I am a big fan of reading on line – but rather that it doesn’t touch on one of the most important aspects of reading where I am concerned – and that is the social nature of books.


Books, to me, aren’t just for reading: they are for sharing. Perhaps this is because – unlike many book lovers I know – I tend not to hang onto books after I have read them, part of the pleasure I take in a good book is thinking about who I can pass it onto when I am finished with it. (Even those books – like my beloved Pratchett – which I keep in the knowledge I will read them again, I tend to loan to friends to read). Few things give me greater pleasure than being able to press a book I love onto a friend, hoping they will love it to – plus it makes me feel less guilty about the vast amount of money I spend on hardbacks if I know that someone else will get the benefit of my purchase, even if that someone else is only my local charity shop.

Many of the books I have read this year have come ‘pre-loved’: two of my friends had massive clearouts, giving me piles of novels that I otherwise would not have read, and I spend more money than is healthy in the British Heart Foundation bookshop at the end of my street. Having someone whose opinion you trust recommend something to you is a great way of discovering new authors – and I’m much more likely to read them if that recommendation comes with, ‘here’s my copy’ than if someone tells me I should download something, which just gets added to a long list of things I need to remember. Likewise, I’ve discovered some great books while browsing my friends’ shelves, usually when I stay with them – and people are far more likely to let you rifle through their paperbacks than hand you their Kindle or iPad and tell you to help yourself.

It could be argued, of course, that preventing readers getting hold of books for nothing, or for a pittance from a charity shop, is helping authors at a time when the publishing industry is suffering: but I think often the opposite is true. Having borrowed a friend’s copy of a Mark Billingham book, I ended up buying his entire backlist – admittedly some second hand, but plenty from Amazon and Waterstone’s. A similar thing happened with the CJ Sansom Shardlake books – I would never have got into them had I not idly picked up a copy when I was at a friend’s, and I subsequently bought three more of his books. I hate to think of the books I’d have missed out on had I not been introduced to them in hard copy.

Of course I’m not against digital publishing: even if I were, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle (and as an author myself, I like the immediacy and control of digital publishing, especially when so many mainstream publishers are becoming celebrity focused and risk averse). I think the world has room for both, and will ultimately be richer for it. But actual books – physical books – will always have a place in my heart and my home – and I’ll always be the person forcing books on my friends with the breathless imploration “You simply MUST read this”. Because to me, that’s part of the fun.