Kindle Voyage | review by Stephen Theaker

I didn’t buy a Kindle Voyage right away. The initial reviews weren’t good, and those that were seemed to come from tech reviewers who didn’t give the impression that they would be using the things for reading anyway. The Kindle Paperwhite had been a huge disappointment to me. The touch screen worked better than the touchscreens on any other ebook readers I had, and made it a device you could hold in lots of different positions, but the name was an outright lie, the e-ink screen no whiter than that of the earlier grey Kindle with a keyboard. The backlight didn’t make it look paper white, it was a ghastly green, and could never be completely turned off.

And yet I used it a lot, because our house is fairly dim, even in daylight, and once I had an ebook reader with a backlight there was no way Mrs Theaker was going to let me have a bedside lamp on at night.

That made me keen for a replacement, but distrustful of marketing promises. I wanted to see one in action in a Waterstone’s before buying, but the Kindle table in our local branch has now been colonised by gift books. I might have gone without buying one at all if it hadn’t been for the recent Fire Phone offer, which I went for, then cancelled, leaving me with a bad case of emptor interruptus.

When it arrived, my first impression was that the Voyage is essentially an upgraded – fixed – Paperwhite. Both children upon seeing it asked, “What’s the difference?” The screen itself, when the backlight is off, is practically indistinguishable from the Paperwhite’s. The increase in resolution is difficult to spot – although comparing it to my very first Kindle, the big white one that had to be sent from the USA, the improvement is clear: the text on that one now looks fuzzy. There are no new fonts, sizes or margin settings in addition to those on the Paperwhite, except when reading pdfs, where you can now choose to slightly increase the margins.

With the backlight on, though, the improvement from the Paperwhite is obvious. The light is much more even, much nicer to look at; it glows rather than ghosts. I think we are supposed to keep the light of this one on all the time, since a new setting of Auto Brightness lets the device choose its own brightness over the course of the day. It likes itself rather brighter than I like it, and its fluctuations are often puzzling, but the effort is welcome. I’m torn between appreciating the light and regarding it as a cheat, an admission that these e-ink screens have reached their technical limits and are never going to become as white as the pages of a book.

However, the more I use the Kindle Voyage – and I’m using it a lot, my Paperwhite passed on without even a kiss goodbye – the more I come to appreciate its small improvements on its predecessor. It doesn’t have buttons for turning the page, but instead has a quartet of pressure sensors, two on each side. Two are a few centimetres long, for moving on to the next page, two are mere dots, for going back – the latter are very difficult to find when reading in the dark at night. These can all be set to issue a tiny feedback thud when pressed. The result is the most immersive reading experience I have ever had, being able to go from one page to the next with the slightest squeeze of the thumb. Even when reading in positions that make the sensors hard to reach – or reading in landscape mode, where for some reason they don’t work – the Voyage improves upon the Paperwhite. Its screen is flush with the sides of the device, making touchscreen swipes simpler, more effective, and less irksome when reading for long periods.

There are other slight changes. All progress info, when displayed, now appears on the bottom left. When opening a new book from the Kindle store, a new About the Book panel appears, providing info about the book and any series of which it is a part, and letting you know how long it generally takes people to read it. The power button is on the back rather than the bottom, which is handier. The device gets quite cold outdoors. It’s a bit lighter than the Paperwhite, and to enhance that I’ve made a conscious decision not to buy a case for it, because once the Paperwhite went into its excellent case it never really came out of it. I’ve gone back to the simple sleeve that came with the original Sony Reader.

Overall, then, I’m surprised by how much I like the Voyage, though its improvements over the Paperwhite are so hard to spot. It just fixes everything that needed fixing, and is very pleasant to read. If you’d told me when I bought that original Sony Reader that the top of the range ereader so many years later would see so few major improvements I’d have been surprised. Still no colour, pages still grey, battery power barely improved, music and audiobook playback lost… I’ll read dozens if not hundreds of books on this device, but it’ll take something special to make me buy another. (He says, knowing in his heart it isn't true.) ****

Theakerly thoughts: what's making me happy?

This time I’m going to concentrate on what’s been making me happy this week, in honour of the segment at the end of Pop Culture Happy Hour, one of my favourite podcasts. Please just take it as read that my adorable little family is, as ever, making me happy, and that I am thoroughly enjoying my day-to-day work. I just don’t tend to talk about that kind of stuff in detail on here. Because you’re all vultures who would steal my life if I let you.

So, what’s been making me happy?

Expanding my daily to-do lists from ten to twenty items. At the core of it is still the ten big things I need to get done each day, but the other ten give me credit for all the daily stuff that needs doing – dealing with email, my morning pomodoro of writing, taking the kids to school, collecting the kids, and, erm, weighing myself. It’s good. Instead of the morning run being a frustrating obstacle to my tasklist, it’s now a nice simple job to tick off. Best of all, my weekday scores now produce a percentage. (91% last week!)

The Logitech k480 keyboard. Admittedly it’s a bit plasticky, and the T and Y keys on mine don’t work very well (a replacement is on its way), but this is going to be my best friend during November. A groove along the top lets it hold a tablet, and a dial lets you pick between three Bluetooth devices – which might not sound that amazing till you realise that to achieve the same thing with the Apple keyboard you have to power off all the other devices with which it has previously been paired. Really looking forward to taking this out and about for my November novelling sessions, and writing away on my iPod.

The backlog of reviews is finally starting to melt away. Well, it’s down to twenty. Twelve if you only count things I was given for review, and not things I read and began to write about. My goal for issue 50 is to completely clear the backlog, even if it means re-reading some of the books. A pomodoro (25 minutes) of writing each morning isn’t a lot, but it’s a lot more than nothing, and applied to short stuff like reviews it moves things along quite nicely, without getting in the way of anything else.

The new Aphex Twin album, Syro. It’s a lot like the Analord records, and those come very close to my idea of ideal music, so I’m very happy with it.

The youngest of our family gave me some sparkly dinosaur stickers to stick on the side of my PC.

Using my old Kindle again. Reading about the Kindle Voyage make me realise I’m kind of sick of the Kindle Paperwhite, and its damnable lack of buttons. I’m leaning towards the view that touchscreen ereaders are an abomination. The Paperwhite works better than any other I’ve tried (a Sony and a Kobo), but still, it’s a relief to get back to reading on a device that switches pages with a button press.

Nanowrimo is coming and I have an idea! This usually doesn’t happen until October 30. And I learnt a lot from taking part last year, which is going to help a lot in shaping my plans. Even though it was my umpteenth time taking part, it was my first serious attempt in a while, and my first finished novel in a good few years. I wrote a bunch of blog posts about my experiences last year (here, here and here), so I’ll be studying those carefully in the next few weeks. One thing I remember very clearly: don’t start a novel with someone flying through the air over the ocean alone with no way to talk to anyone, because what the heck are you going to write about? This year’s Nanowrimo starts on a Saturday, which is pretty much ideal for getting off to a good start.

If something’s been making you happy, let us know in the comments!

Ten Kindles I have known

I do love a Kindle, as I’m sure you know by now if you have ever visited this blog before. I think I’ve used at least ten different Kindles, but let’s see. I write this knowing it won’t interest anyone but me. But I will find it fascinating.

1. The iPad Kindle app, which by checking my iTunes receipts I can see I got in the week of 13 May 2010. In fact, it’s the very first item on my very first iTunes receipt. I’d had a pair of Sony Readers and though I used them a lot, I only bought a few books in that format (from WH Smith, weirdly), because they were so expensive, such a faff to get on there, and I had lots of review stuff to keep me occupied. I did give iBooks a try (another iTunes receipt tells me that on 12 June 2010 I bought Neal Asher’s Shadow of the Scorpion) on there, but the iPad was a bit big for reading at length, and I couldn’t conveniently take it with me anywhere to read. Even now that it’s 37 generations behind the times I’m still reluctant to get it out in public. Funny now to think that when it first came out, sensible people were calling the iPad a Kindle killer. More like a stalking horse.

2. International Kindle (version 2). After settling for that pair of Sony Readers while impatiently waiting for Amazon to release the Kindle here, and then using the iPad app, this was my first actual Kindle. At this point they were still being shipped from the US. There’s a lot to like about this Kindle, not least that it still, even now, has absolutely free 3G internet access, and unlike more recent iterations it’s not restricted to browsing the Amazon store and receiving publications. You can use it to browse the wider web, albeit fairly slowly. It also has a nice little pair of speakers and a keyboard (which was a big selling point for me after struggling to make notes on the Sony Readers), sits nicely in your hand because its width lets it balance, and it has nice big buttons for clicking forward and back between pages. I still use this one from time to time.

3. Kindle (version 3, wi-fi only). Retrospectively renamed the Kindle Keyboard, the first of these I bought was for Mrs Theaker, and I was jealous of its wi-fi, which for the first time let documents be emailed to it without incurring a charge, and the ability to change the contrast of text in pdfs – useful for many review pdfs. One thing I don’t like about Mrs Theaker’s Kindle version 3 is that the keyboard buttons are a bit scratchy.

4. Kindle (version 3, wi-fi only). This one was mine. I just got too jealous of Mrs Theaker’s and bought myself one. Not quite as easy to hold as the v2, and the keyboard lost the number row, but as well as the features mentioned above it had one that made it ideal for an internet addict for me: it could only access the internet if the wifi router allowed it, and I made sure it didn’t. That meant no breaking away from reading to check my email just one more time before sleeping. The v3 had nice speakers too, and plenty of room for audiobooks.

5. Kindle (version 3, wi-fi only). Being an idiot I once put my v3 under my pillow and then leant on it with my elbow. Amazon let me have a new one for £40 in return for sending them the broken one, and I still use it quite often, especially for reading comics (the panel view is glitchy on the Paperwhite) and listening to audiobooks and music (I keep the new Pixies MP3s on it).

6. Kindle Android app on Google Nexus. I want to like this, and it’s slowly getting better, but it has problems. It doesn’t use the full height of the Nexus screen, and you can’t turn the brightness of the screen down to a bearable level. If I’m reading on the Nexus, I tend to use Play Books instead, which doesn’t have those problems.

7. Kindle Android app on Samsung phone. I want to like this more than I do, but the phone is always running out of power and slow to respond and by the time the app has loaded itself and loaded a book I’m often past the point where I needed something to read.

8. Kindle Paperwhite. I wasn’t that impressed by this model at first: it certainly didn’t live up to the promise of its name, and was quickly dubbed the Kindle Ghostlight in our house. The backlight caused strange shadows at the bottom of the screen, and could never be switched entirely off, giving it an eerie green glow. But it grew on me very quickly, for a few reasons. Its case is lovely, and switches it on automatically. All the screen, except left and top bars, can be tapped for next page, so you can hold it in lots of different positions and there’s no need for irritating swipes. No internet browsing on 3G, only book shopping, which means I don’t waste time checking my email on it. The downside: from the day I got a Paperwhite I had to negotiate in order to read in bed with the lamp on, and that’s made me very, very slow to read paper books, to the point where I’ve told publishers to stop sending them to us for review.

9. Kindle Desktop. I would like this a lot more if you could access your personal documents on it, since review copies make up a lot of my reading. It’d be really handy to browse my notes on the Kindle Desktop, side by side with the reviews I’m writing. Instead I have to cross refer to a physical Kindle. Disappointing.

10. Kindle Cloud Reader. Quite handy, but again suffers from a lack of personal documents, for me at least.

That’s a lot of Kindles. There are quite a few Kindles I’ve never tried, but the two I wish I’d had were the original, and the big Kindle DX. I was desperate for a DX at one point, but the lack of wifi and the way it couldn’t annotate pdfs meant it was never going to be a sensible use of my money. Still want one though.

Kindles that don’t yet exist that I would like: Kindle on Xbox, a little phone-sized Kindle, and Kindle on Google Glasses. That’s what I’ve always dreamed of – to be able to read while walking around, without walking into lamp-posts.

Wednesday is occasionally list day on the blog, though not as frequently this year because I have been so busy, and this is list #17. I would describe this as our most boring yet, but I fear my muse would take that as a challenge.

Theakerly thoughts #6: audiobooks on Kindle, author firewalls, Mike Barrett

Thought 1. I’d forgotten how much I liked listening to audiobooks on my Kindle v.3 (the grey ones, now renamed Kindle Keyboards). Unlike an iPod it has little speakers that are fine for speech, and there’s a headphone jack for playing the books out to stereos, speakers and headphones. The older Kindles are even compatible with Audible files, and keep your place in them. Best of all, you can’t do anything else with the device while you’re listening. I have a bad habit of playing an audiobook on, say, the iPad, then wondering what else I could do while listening, and five minutes later turning off the audiobook because I’m reading a newspaper article and not paying the book any attention. You can’t do that with the old Kindles.

Thought 2. Ironic that the staunchest defender of an author who dived into a comment thread to set a reviewer straight is the same fellow who said this last May when explaining why he doesn’t review self-published books:

“We don’t know how you’ll react. The erratic behaviour of the author mentioned in [another article] is a strong illustration of why we don’t read self-published authors. We don’t have a firewall between us and the writer. Books from publishing houses that don’t have any self-published books give a level of detachment between what we write and the reaction we’ll get.”

So last year it was all about firewalls and detachment from the author’s reaction, this year “I welcome author’s [sic] comments” and those who don’t are bullies. Perhaps it’s different when the author is relatively famous.

Thought 3. During the all-too-brief time I edited Dark Horizons for the British Fantasy Society, some of my favourite articles were those by Mike Barrett on the history of fantasy and horror publishing. Some of those articles, plus several others, have now been collected in an Alchemy Press collection, Doors to Elsewhere, with an introduction by Ramsey Campbell. The articles were carefully researched, educational and well worth your time. More information here.

Quartet & Triptych on Kindle – for free!

Readers with Kindles (or Kindle apps) may be interested to know that Matthew Hughes' very fine novella Quartet & Triptych is in the current issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Take them up on a 14-day trial subscription and you can read one of my very favourite novellas of the last couple of years for free.

My review is here ("I loved every word of it, and if this is typical of Hughes' work I expect I'll read every novel he ever writes"), and you can get the trial subscription here.

The original hardback from PS Publishing (pictured) has sold out, but a signed edition is still available.

I was also really pleased to see that his Henghis Hapthorn novels have just been published to Kindle too, because I've been looking forward to reading them: The Spiral Labyrinth, Hespira and Majestrum. At eight quid they're a little pricey for ebooks, but the previews are extensive, so you can have a good read of them before deciding whether to buy.

Kindle Fire - but not in the UK

Bit disappointed that the new Kindle Fire isn't launching in the UK yet - although I imagine Amazon's recent investment in LoveFilm (and hence getting its hands on LoveFilm's streaming deals) means it'll be out here eventually.

Although I love my iPad, it mainly gets used for reading, listening to music and the radio, idle browsing and playing the odd game. The only serious work I do on it is proofreading. I do all my writing on our Samsung Chromebook nowadays: it has a proper keyboard, for one thing, and doesn't get annoyed when I try to use Google Docs.

The Kindle Fire looks to me like it can do almost everything I still use the iPad for, but is much, much cheaper. If it was available here, I'd have pre-ordered one already for Mrs Theaker's birthday. (Last year I got her a third generation Kindle, and she's used it pretty much every day since.)

Theaker's Kindle

The US is also getting the Kindle Touch, which has no keyboard, but does have speakers, and unlike the Kindle Fire still uses e-ink, which is great: I was worried by rumours that Amazon were planning to ditch e-ink screens altogether, and that would have been nuts. The iPad screen is great for reading comics or watching movies, but I wouldn't choose to read a long novel on one, and I imagine it'll be the same for the Kindle Fire. Bit worried by the touchscreen – the Sony Reader Touch was horrid – I spent more time cleaning the blasted thing than reading it – but I can't imagine Amazon would put out something quite that hopeless.

All the UK is getting for now is the new, ultra-cheap Kindle, which lacks speakers (so no audiobooks) and lacks a keyboard. For most readers, the trade-off in weight and cost will probably be worth it. It's down to 6oz now, apparently, which is old-timey talk for... checks with Google ...170g. About the weight of a small 200pp paperback. I think it'd be a downgrade from the Kindle I've already got (which is now renamed the Kindle Keyboard) – I love being able to make annotations with the keyboard – so I won't be getting one, but I imagine it'll do very well for them, especially at £89.

Are novels about to get shorter?

Changes in the book market have always had a big effect on the length of novels: compare the novels in your collection from the 1850s, the 1950s and the 2010s to see what I mean. We're now well on the way to ebooks becoming the lead format for commercial fiction, and I think that's going to lead to another big change: shorter commercial novels. Here are a few reasons why:

1. People shopping for Kindle books don't seem to compare books by length the way bookshop buyers do.
2. Economies of scale in printing stop being an issue.
3. Low pricing of ebooks - if a 200,000 word novel sells at the same price as a 30,000 word novella (e.g. I paid more or less the same price for UR and The Colorado Kid that I paid for Under the Dome), it makes sense for the author to produce shorter, more frequent books.
4. Ebooks don't disappear from the shelves as quickly; you don't need to snap them up just in case it goes out of print. So it's in the interest of writers to write books that readers finish, rather than just collect, so that when your next book comes out they're ready to read it.
5. Shorter books are less work for everyone involved, so if people can make the same money selling short books that they make selling long ones, they will.

That doesn't mean every book will be shorter, any more than every book is now long - the small press will carry on doing its own thing, as will authors who can set their own terms - but I think these factors will exert a powerful downward pressure on the length of commercial novels over the years to come.

But I could be wrong - we'll see!

Kindle in the UK, almost a year in

Amazing to think that it is still less than a year since Kindle launched in the UK, given the impact it's had…

The bigger Waterstone's in Birmingham already looks like a gift shop downstairs, although I suppose that's not just down to Kindle – it's Kindle on top of all the bookselling Amazon was already doing. It's always been hard for Waterstone's to compete with Amazon's wide range of books, its low prices, and (not a minor issue for me) the good condition of the books on sale. But I think Kindle's the straw that's prodding them over the edge.

It was very nice on holiday this past week to have The Guardian delivered to the Kindle first thing each morning, and that finished I had dozens of books and audiobooks on there to choose from. The free internet access came in very handy as well. On the iPad, I had a bunch of graphic novels, the British Library's brilliant 19th Century Books app, articles, stories and interviews in the McSweeney's app, and access if I needed it to hundreds more books stored in Dropbox (use this referral link to earn me bonus space!).

It was also very nice to know, given where I live and what was happening here while I was away, that a big chunk of my book collection would survive any fire.

The sky is falling! PS Publishing publish ebooks!

PS Publishing have always combined a commitment to quality in fiction and production with a willingness to embrace experimentation. Not just in the texts they publish, but also in their publishing: for example they were supplying pdfs for review to bloggers years before Netgalleys was around. The review section of our magazine pretty much owes its existence to that generosity.

I'm delighted to see that they have now begun to publish ebooks. What's more, they've settled on much lower prices than originally announced.

We've reviewed six of those announced, and all were well worth the tiny amounts of money being charged:

• LIVING WITH THE DEAD – Darrell Schweitzer, £1.99 – our review
• THE BABYLONIAN TRILOGY – Sébastien Doubinsky, £3.99 – our review
• WHAT WILL COME AFTER – Scott Edelman, £3.99 – our review
• SONG OF TIME – Ian R. MacLeod, £3.99 – our review
• GILBERT AND EDGAR ON MARS – Eric Brown, £1.99 – our review
• THE LIBRARY OF FORGOTTEN BOOKS – Rjurik Davidson, £1.99 – our review

Also publishing at £3.99 are these titles:

• THE LAND AT THE END OF THE WORKING DAY – Peter Crowther
• BLACK WINGS – ed. S.T. Joshi
• CATASTROPHIA – ed. Allen Ashley
• A YEAR IN THE LINEAR CITY / A PRINCESS OF THE LINEAR JUNGLE – Paul Di Filippo
• CLOWNS AT MIDNIGHT – Terry Dowling
• CAGE OF NIGHT – Ed Gorman
• OUT THERE IN THE DARKNESS – Ed Gorman
• THE MOVING COFFIN – Ed Gorman
• SEEING DELL – Carol Guess
• DARKNESS ON THE EDGE – ed. Harrison Howe
• GRAZING THE LONG ACRE – Gwyneth Jones
• TALES FROM THE FRAGRANT HARBOUR – Garry Kilworth
• MOBY JACK – Garry Kilworth
• DIVERSIFICATIONS – James Lovegrove
• CINEMA FUTURA – ed. Mark Morris
• URBIS MORPHEUS – Stephen Palmer
• LITERARY REMAINS – Ray Russell
• OSAMA – Lavie Tidhar
• THE PAINTING AND THE CITY – Robert F. Wexler

And for £1.99 you will be able to get these novellas and shorter collections of short stories:

• THE EXTRAORDINARY VOYAGE OF JULES VERNE – Eric Brown
• STARSHIP SUMMER – Eric Brown
• STARSHIP FALL – Eric Brown
• STARSHIP WINTER – Eric Brown
• THE BROKEN MAN – Michael Byers
• THE MERMAIDS – Robert Edric
• THE LIVES OF SAVAGES – Robert Edric
• HOMESCHOOLING – Carol Guess
• REUNION – Rick Hautala
• SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD – David Moles
• THE LANGUAGE OF DYING – Sarah Pinborough
• THE ENIGMA OF DEPARTURE – Nicholas Royle
• IMPOSSIBILIA – Doug Smith
• CLOUD PERMUTATIONS – Lavie Tidhar
• GOREL AND THE POT-BELLIED GOD – Lavie Tidhar

And lots of individual short stories are available too, for just 79p.

The titles are available in DRM-free epub and mobi formats (suitable for Sony Readers and Kindles respectively, along with many other devices) from the ebooks section of the PS Publishing website. There are at least half a dozen titles there that I'll be buying as soon as they become available…

Isabelle, Andre Gide – and reading in French on the Kindle

Reading and reviewing The Translation of Father Torturo, with its themes of Catholicism and amorality, left me fancying a little Gide, and so here I am. A review of an established classic such as this seems rather redundant, and indeed part of my reason for reading it was to read something I wouldn't have to review, giving me a chance to catch up on all those reviews that are currently unfinished. But reading this book was a revelation to me, for reasons noted at the end of this post, and I was determined to share my discovery. Before that, I will say a few words about it; to do otherwise about such a marvellous book would almost be criminal.

This was a excellent short novel, though Gide himself I think would have described it as a recit (please excuse the lack of accents throughout this post). It concerns Gerard Lacase, who upon visiting an abandoned house with friends tells them how he first came there as a young man. His professed purpose in visiting le chateau de la Quartfourche was for research, towards a degree, but other things were on his mind from the very beginning. "Je sais de reste ce qui l'attend sur le sentier de la vertu; mais l'autre route?... l'autre route..."

The less virtuous path is that of the novelist: "des qu'on se croit ne romancier on s'accorde aussitot toux les droits". From the house and its occupants he wishes to extract every possible morsel of material for his fiction. Upon discovering the image of an absent mother, Isabelle de Saint-Aureol, he becomes determined to meet her, and to win her confidence. He pursues her as if in love, and the reader may wonder as to the lack of effect that the revelations of her poor character has upon his ardour.

This is a woman, for example, who has abandoned her disabled son to the care of her parents; a son disabled, it is implied, because she strapped down her stomach to keep her unplanned pregnancy a secret. ("On attribue l'infirmite de Casimir aux soins que sa mere avait pris pour dissimuler sa grossesse ...") Gerard watches her steal jewellery from her family, and yet his attraction to her is undiminished.

The answer is that his interest in her isn't truly that of the lover, it's that of the novelist, romancier rather than romancer. "Cette nuit que vous l'attendiez, prete a fuir avec lui, que pensiez-vous?" he asks with a particular lack of sensitivity about the night her lover died. An alternative reading is perhaps possible – he does after all say to himself disappointedly, realising the impossibility of eliciting love from cruel, selfish Isabelle,"est-ce la comme elle savait aimer?"

But he then says of her, "Je ne sentais plus aucun desir de la questionner davantage; subitement incurieux de sa personne et de sa vie, je restais devant elle comme un enfant devant un jouet qu'il a brise pour en decouvrir la mystere ..." Her mystery revealed, her story told, his interest evaporates, he moves on.

She is unchanged, and perhaps unchangeable, but he is not. His experiences have after all led him to the path of virtue: a real affection for young Casimir, for whom he provides a home. The novel suggests there is yet hope for those of us who, seeing someone in distress, has first or second the thought: this would make a good story.

However, my original reason for blogging about this book lies not with its content, but with the way in which I read it. What I realised here was that I could buy a French dictionary for the Kindle, set it temporarily as the default dictionary, and so use it to instantly look up the words I didn't know while reading a French novel. For anyone studying a foreign language, that makes the Kindle an utterly essential purchase.

Of course, little of this will come as a surprise to our American friends, who have had Kindles for years, but it's only been out in the UK for a few months, so we're still catching up.

The dictionary I bought was the Merriam-Webster French-English Translation Dictionary. I would have preferred a French-only dictionary too, because it's better when reading in a foreign language to stay within that language as far as possible – to build a framework of words that stands alone, rather than one requiring the scaffold of your English – but I'm sure one will be available before long.

As well as helping English people to read French books, how phenomenally useful the Kindle and its built-in dictionary must be for people learning English as a foreign language!

If using the Kindle in this way, I recommend upping the font size quite a bit, making it easier to zip around the page to find definitions.

The selection of French books on Amazon is not terrific as yet, the vast majority being texts also available for free via Project Gutenberg, so that's a good place to start. Bookmark http://m.gutenberg.org/ on your Kindle for easy access to the mobile version. Here are direct links to Flaubert, Dumas, Stendhal and Jules Verne.

Isabelle, Andre Gide, Project Gutenberg, Kindle edition, 1215ll.

Why aren't I reading my print books any more?

Yesterday I blogged about my realisation of how few of my print books I've been reading lately. The last time I read a print novel that I bought was in January of this year; the time before that was in 2008. I've got about 1100 unread books on my shelf – at the current rate I'd be lucky to read 50 of those before dying!

So naturally that got me to wondering why I've stopped reading them.

Getting lots of books for review

This is clearly a big factor. I'm getting lots of brand new books to review all the time. Nowhere near as many as Book Chick City, but enough to keep me ticking over. The novelty of a brand new book makes it more attractive, while the deadline for a review gives the reading a bit of urgency. Reading new books for review obviously leaves less time for digging into my collection.

But looking at my list of books read over the last couple of years, when I have had a break from reviewing, I haven't gone to my print books. I've bought books for the Kindle (Best Served Cold, Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, The Third Man, UR), and before that the Sony Reader (The Eyre Affair, Elder Scrolls: The Infernal City) or grabbed them for free from Feedbooks (The Pirates of Zan), Project Gutenberg (Stand by for Mars!) or the Baen Library (The Sea Hag).

So this can't be the only factor.

The chain effect

If I finish reading a book on the Kindle, chances are I just open up the next book I fancy on the Kindle and start reading that. My tolerance for hunting through my bookcases for particular books has withered away to nothing, for one thing! But also, when I finish a book I'm rarely sitting in my study surrounded by my print books. I'm usually lying in bed. Sometimes I'm on a bus or a train, or at the in-laws, or at a friend's house. If print books aren't handy during that crucial handover from one book to another, they're locked out until the next time I finish a book; my ebooks are always close to hand.

The way I buy books has changed

In the past, I would see a book I wanted and buy it right away, because it would probably be gone the next day. Even now, with Amazon, new books can go out of print very quickly. With ebooks it's a bit different. The publisher may eventually withdraw the book from sale, but they're not going to run out of copies, or dither over whether to reprint. I don't need to hoard books any more. So instead of buying everything I see, I download a Kindle preview, and once I've actually started reading the book – and if I like it – I buy it.

My bookshelves, on the other hand, are full of stuff that I thought I might want to read at some point. Graham Greene, Carl Hiaasen, James Ellroy, Marion Zimmer Bradley, C.J. Cherryh, Emile Zola, William Shatner. Great writers all, and I've read a novel or two by each of them. But I've anything up to a dozen more by each on my shelves, and I'm not desperate to read any of them right now.

Then there are the anthologies, the Best New Horrors, the Best New SFs, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, the Black Books of Horror, the Humdrumming Books of Horror, the Derleth, Haining and Greenberg anthologies – nothing wrong with any of them, but they've been sitting on my shelves for years waiting for me to feel like reading them, and as Shatner himself sang, it hasn't happened yet.

Now, I tend to only buy books on the day I'm going to read them. All those books on the shelves? I still might read them – someday – but probably not many of them.

Reading is nicer on the Kindle

Here's the nub of it. Paper books are not as much fun to read.

I'm not a booksniffer. Booksniffers are those people who, at the mention of ebooks, say things like "Ah, but you can't beat a real book", and accompany those words by opening out their hands as if they were the pages of a book, and for bonus points lift up the imaginary book to their noses for a sniff. They often close their eyes while doing this, which is an odd way to approach reading.

The strange thing is that, too often, they don't just express this idea as a personal preference, but hold it to be a universal truth, and are frequently shocked – and even angry – to hear people disagree. They honestly believe that people who buy ebooks do it under protest, or through aesthetic weakness, or in the dazzle of novel technology (pun intended), and so on. Some will even say that people using ebooks are deluding themselves.

But nope, for me, reading books on a Kindle is a much better experience than reading in print.

Of course, I accept that some people will always prefer print books. Maybe they really couldn't live without the smell of book mould. Many seem to expect an imminent apocalypse, given how worried they are about not being able to recharge a Kindle every three weeks. Most haven't even seen a Kindle, but know for certain that it's just like reading on a computer screen. They shouldn't worry: there will always be publishers and booksellers to cater to their fetish for paper.

But it is a fetish. From the Penguin Concise English Dictionary, a couple of relevant definitions. Fetish: "an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion" – check! And fetishism? "The displacement of erotic interest and satisfaction to a fetish." Exactly: the object of a reader's interest should in theory be the text of a novel, not the paper it is printed on. Displacing the interest from the novel to the paper is fetishism.

I'm still reading a few paper books every month for review, and my goodness they're annoying. Not in any big ways, but in lots of little ways that add up to an inferior experience overall.

Here are a few of the ways paper books annoy me:

• You have to transcribe any passages you want to quote – you can't just copy them across.
• You have to choose between using a bookmark to keep your place, or folding back the book's corners.
• The only way to search the text for a phrase is by re-reading the book.
• You can't read them in the rain.
• Lots of them are heavy.
• And bulky.
• Reading them in bed on your side is a nightmare.
• The text often disappears into the spine.
• Reading the book damages it.
• You can't change the size of the font when your eyes get tired, or when you get older and short sighted. If you need to read a print book in large print you have to hope someone publishes a large print edition.
• You need to buy – and build! – bookcases to store them on. They take up most of your house, if you let them. (And boy have I let them!)
• All those books are a huge fire risk.
• And once you've got them on those shelves, the only way to put them in order is to do it manually, one book at a time.
• And if you sort them by author, but then say want to see them sorted by publisher, date bought, date read, title or genre, it takes more than just a single click. They need to be re-sorted one by one, a process that could take days if you have as many printed books as I do. In practice, you will probably never sort your books in this way.
• When you buy a bunch of new books? You have to shuffle all the books on all the shelves along to make room. And probably buy a new bookcase. And build it. Or throw some books away.
• They are incredibly wasteful. Do you know how many books Oxfam pulps every year? How many are destroyed by bookshops who rip off the front covers to claim returns?
• No built-in dictionary. You need an extra book for that.
• No built-in encyclopedia either. Again, you need an extra book for that.
• No built-in highlighter. You can highlight with a pen, but it permanently defaces the book.
• If you do make notes in your print book, or highlights, you can't just export them to your computer. You have to type them all up.
• If you want to buy a new book, you have to either wait a few days for it to be delivered, or go and collect it from a shop.
• People look at you funny if you stand in a shop and read the first thirty pages of a book before buying it.
• If you leave the house with a new book and it turns out to be a lemon, you're stuck with it. You can't just switch to one of your other books.
• Paper books don't read themselves to you while you're cooking!
• If you go on holiday or travel for more than a day there's a limit on how many paper books you can take with you, and on how many you can bring back with you (I brought a suitcase full of books back from my honeymoon in Paris, and wished I could have carried twice as many.)
• If you buy a new paper book, only one person in the family can read it at once. You can snuggle up with the spouse and read together, but that only works as long as you're on the same page.
• When you've read a book, you can either keep it forever, in which case it'll take up space in your house until the day you die, or you can sell it or give it away to charity, in which case it will be gone.
• You can't carry all your books with you wherever you go. If a paper book makes an allusion to another book you've read, you can't check it till you get home. When reading Tony Blair's A Journey (perhaps unsurprisingly the only Kindle purchase so far that I didn't manage to finish!) there was a reference to the rewriting of clause 4. Did it agree with Mandelson's account in The Third Man? I wasn't sure, so, despite being in a pub, I switched to that book, searched for clause 4, and re-read Mandelson's version.

A militant booksniffer will have a counter-argument for all of these. They don't read in bed, so it doesn't matter if books are hard to read lying on your side. Their shelves are all in perfect order. Their eyes never get tired. Or they have a magnifying glass. They don't need bookmarks, because they remember what page they were on. Wanting to copy quotes instead of transcribing is lazy.

A lot of booksniffer arguments come down to laziness. Yes, they seem to say, paper books are a bit inconvenient, but if you weren't so lazy, you'd put up with it. The implicit argument is that print books are worth making the effort, that we're not working hard enough to keep them alive. But why should we? I care about novels being published, but I couldn't care less whether they're printed on paper or not. I spend hours every day reading, and so I want to make that time as pleasant as possible. For me, reading print books is like putting my TV on its side: I could still watch all the programs, if I made a bit of an effort and tipped my head, but why put myself to that trouble?

For some readers, each and every one of those counter-arguments will hold true, and the Kindle really would be no benefit at all to them. For example, Quentin S. Crisp has pulled a few examples out from the above list here with the intention of showing that none of them are particularly significant, but that's kind of the point. They're all very small things, but small things add up. The result, for me, has been that when I've come to choose what book to read next, the paper books have been at a disadvantage. The reading experience on the Kindle is a little bit better in every way, which in sum makes it quite a bit better overall.

It's like Hobnobs: I love the originals, but I very rarely buy them any more, because Chocolate Hobnobs are just that little bit tastier!

Conclusion

So I think those are the reasons I'm not reading my collection of print books any more. No big revelation, no great insight: they're just getting squeezed out by books for review, by books on the Kindle, by their own general awkwardness and inaccessibility. When I read a paper book now I find myself having to develop workarounds to do the things a Kindle would let me do without any trouble!

That's not to say I don't still love the paper books I own, or that if I lost my Kindle or Sony Reader I wouldn't go back to them, but they're second best now. Not by much – maybe just by a fraction – but by just enough that I never seem to pick them up any more, and I think the rate at which they are being shipped off to charity shops is only going to increase.

Is there any point in buying print books if I'm not going to read them?

I was thinking this morning about buying the new collection of short stories by Johnny Mains, With Deepest Sympathy, from Obverse Books. It looks interesting, and I liked the last book I read from that publisher.

But it's not out on Kindle, which made me think: am I ever going to read this? When was the last time I bought and read a book in print? I couldn't actually remember. So I went to look at my list of books read on Goodreads.

Leaving aside the Penguin 60s I used to read when collecting the children from school, I found that during 2009 and 2010 I read just one novel or short story collection that I bought in print format.

It was Mass Effect: Revelations, by Drew Karpyshyn, back in January of this year, when I was in the full throes of a Mass Effect obsession.

The one before that was all the way back in December 2008, when I read Derai, a fine book in E.C. Tubb's Dumarest series, and then October 2008, for Deb Olin Unferth's interesting novel from McSweeney's, Vacation.
 
I read books in print when they're submitted for review, of course, and I have bought the odd book in print this year, most recently The Seventh Black Book of Horror – I was keen to read the infamous "Bernard Bought the Farm"!

But buying print books – and filling up my house with them – starts to seem a bit pointless if I'm only going to read one or two of them a year – or none at all in 2009.

In fact, when I do fancy reading one of the paper books I own, especially the hardbacks, my first thought is to look it up in the Kindle store. I'd rather pay a few extra quid and read it on Kindle...