Noel Rock: The E-Book - A book without a spine or a soul

Books and jumpers: the two gifts that no young people want to get at Christmas.

When I was 11, I was solidly disgusted to get both in a double whammy of mediocre Christmas presents and vowed to never, ever ask for a book for Christmas. Now that I’m defending the very object that I loathed merely ten years ago, I can’t help but feel that I’m betraying the younger Me.
Nevertheless, a lot changes in a decade and now I’ve evolved into appreciating books, whilst the world – supposedly – has evolved beyond them and seems ready to confine them to the scrapheap of history.

The e-book, it boasts on its cover, will “revolutionise both publishing and reading” and that after merely seeing one, you’ll “never want to pick up a book again”.

This is heartily amusing, especially when the model I sampled came with – yes – an instruction booklet. Apparently you’ll need to pick up one more book after all.

The e-book has a lot going for it: it weighs less, it’s smaller and you’ll never rip it. However, there are also several potential worries that weigh on your mind more than a paperback would weigh in your hand.

One does worry that this gives further rise to the current flurry of intellectual kleptomania that we see in society: why carry one book when you can carry one hundred?

The first chapter of Portrait Of A Lady is a bit dull? Delete it. The ending of A Clockwork Orange doesn’t match the movie ending that you like? Skip it.

Worse still, maybe it will give rise to the incessant tinkering that has plagued the movie industry since digitalisation (hello George Lucas!).

Or, perhaps, e-books will become like albums in the iPod age: disposable, fragmented and redundant.
Why bother with Freakonomics? Just read the controversial chapter and you’re home. Perhaps, though, this isn’t a bad thing. Are some books as guilty as Coldplay for circulating pointless filler?
The e-book, as charming a device as it is, is frought with such flaws and plagued by other unseen forthcomings. How do you fold a page for a friend, how do you inhabit the book by leaving notes in the margins?

It removes the interaction, the lasting appeal and – ultimately – the humanity of the book. Ostentation can blind for a day, but nothing compares to having a book for life.