Mihir S Sharma: Screens and paper

It is likely that I have been reading books on a screen for longer than most people have. And, of the books I read today, fewer than a third are the regular bound-paper kind. But, still, I have to admit this: there are some ways in which screens just don't work.

I got my first laptop computer in 2000 - a top-of-the-line Thinkpad I couldn't really afford - and, shortly after that, I discovered e-books. There weren't many around at the time; mostly, it was badly formatted and poorly spell-checked classic novels, on Michael Hart's Gutenberg.org. But for a congenitally lazy graduate student suffering through sub-zero Massachusetts winters, pulling up an Anthony Trollope on your laptop in the warm comfort of your dorm room was worth the occasional befuddling misspelled word. It saved you the painful snowy tramp to the library - and the even more painful tramp back, burdened by several heavy hardbacks.

And then, of course, a few years later, the internet exploded with fan-fiction - born mainly, I suspect, of the long gap between the fourth and fifth Harry Potter books, so thank you for that too, Jo Rowling - and those you had to read on a computer screen. They weren't all very good, but one or two of them helped fill the gnawing void between Potters, and I remember them fondly, if not very well.

For years, books on my computer were pretty much the only option for when I was far away from libraries, or back in India without access to well-stocked bookshops - we forget, really, how limited our shelves used to be till just a few years ago. I've spent countless hours in the mid-2000s in coffee shops looking like I'm working hard at an Excel spreadsheet, when actually I'm reading free sample chapters of some sci-fi thing that the publisher's put online.

Then the Kindle came out, and it changed my life. I was an early adopter - a friend brought the first version back for me from the US a few months after it came out - and for the first time I realised that reading on a screen could be as engrossing as reading dead-tree books. With a computer, you could never quite lose yourself in a book the way you could with a paperback. But, even with the first-generation Kindle, I soon found myself swiping vaguely at the side of the screen to turn the page and needing to remind myself repeatedly to press the "next" button instead. Touch-screens came not a moment too soon as far as I was concerned.

I've since read books on various sized tablets, small and large computer screens, iPhones, phablets, even BlackBerrys. But, if you're reading on a screen, nothing beats a Kindle, or some other e-ink reader. They feel right, down to the slight pause between the pages. You can focus better, almost as well as with a "real" book.

I wonder if there are people, perhaps those mysterious millennials, who can actually concentrate better and for longer when they're reading on a backlit phone or computer screen. Don't get me wrong: e-books have several advantages. For one, since I got the Kindle, I've never had an excess baggage problem. Earlier, I used to anxiously make space for several heavy books even on an overnight trip, and never mind if it meant leaving behind an extra sweater. I could always freeze, but heaven forfend I run out of things to read.

And then there's the fact that you can quickly search the text. This is a godsend especially when you're reading 19th-century Russian novels, and have a terrible head for names. (Damn, who is Pavel Ivanovich again?) I've read War and Peace three times - no this is not a boast, I just have a terrible imagination, and I don't even think the novel is as great as it's supposed to be - and the last time, on the Kindle, was the easiest. Even when Tolstoy re-introduced someone a dozen chapters on, I could always go back swiftly and check where we met them last.

And this helps considerably with classic 1930s murder mysteries, too, in that section where the detective says: "But of course, Wilhelmina, you must consider three curious circumstances: the pince nez on the staircase, the mulberry bush denuded of flowers, and the unopened letter". This used to be, quite literally, murder when you had to flip carefully back through a paperback to figure out what on earth he was referring to.

But there are other ways in which real books still matter. For one, illustrations and maps. You can squint at a map on paper in a way fuzzy e-ink screens can never match. And there's something satisfying about picking up a heavy book after a few days and turning to near the end. It feels like you're on the cusp of an achievement.

Which brings me to the point of this piece. There's a lot of buzz about books on the phone right now. The new publishing house Juggernaut, for example, has a quite enviable stable of names, including Sunny Leone and Prashant Kishor and Hussain Haqqani. But, frankly, I'm buying most of them on paper. Reading entire books on the phone simply isn't feasible for me yet. I get distracted within seconds. Perhaps phone-first books will be different - shorter sections, written differently in order to hold the attention. But it's still not certain how well the format will lend itself to great writing.

For years, people have been predicting e-books will change the way books are written. That they will embed hyper-links, move you back and forth in the narrative seamlessly and at your own choice as much as the author's. That hasn't happened yet; perhaps when it does, reading on your phone will come into its own.

Till then, I'm holding on to the Kindle. And, yes, I'm in the market for yet another bookshelf.
m.s.sharma@gmail.com
Twitter: @mihirssharma