I have always been an avid book lover. As a child, I remember many a Saturday morning spent at the local village library sitting on the cushions in the children’s section reading books. The librarian tried to tell me that if I read them all whilst I was at the library, there wouldn’t be any left for me to take home. A couple of years later, when I was just 8 years old, my school asked that I be taken to the library to get books to read at school, as I had read all the books the school had. I devoured them and, then as now, could easily read a book in a day. For me, the joy of books came from the entire experience, from browsing, picking a book off the shelf, opening it up and reading the first line, to curling up for a day with nothing to do but let the world of the book sweep me away.

So imagine my horror when I first learned of the e-reader.  No more browsing in a library or bookshop, no more running your finger along the spine and deciding if the blurb has done enough to make you open it up.  No more feel of the book in your hands, the frantic turn of a page as you find yourself desperate to know what happens next.  No more living in a house filled with shelves of books, the security blanket to many a book lover.

For me, e-readers sounded the death knell for books. What pleasure could be derived from browsing an online catalogue and then instantly downloading a file to a piece of technology? An e-reader could never look or feel like the real thing. Yes, you could store thousands of books without taking up any space in your house, but who wants bare walls and what would Ikea do when people stopped buying bookcases? You may notice I have a slight flair for the dramatic, but I did see the future heading in a direction which saw the loss of the paper book.

E-readers were first introduced in 1998, and in 2000, Stephen King’s book Ride the Bullet was the first to be released as an e-book only. However it wasn’t until 2007 when Amazon entered the market with the Kindle that e-books began to find their audience. I resisted the onset of the e-book for quite some time. It was January 2011 before I finally purchased an e-reader (after a Christmas spent coveting my mother’s new Kindle), but I was not to give in gracefully and declared it would be for magazines and research books predominantly. It took me around 5 minutes as an e-reader owner to discover that many classics are free to download so Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens crept onto my e-reader without letting the world know.  

Just two years on and I regularly read e-books (although I have now progressed to using an app on my tablet). I find them invaluable on journeys, especially when travelling with hand luggage on well-known budget airlines. So I hereby declare that I was, erm, well, wrong. Six years on from the launch of the Kindle, books are still going strong. If the book signing I went to recently was anything to go by, I am not the only one who still loves books, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival was packed this year. I also find it difficult to be against anything that brings literature to a new readership. As a budding writer, my dream is to have people read my work, in whatever form that takes. Long live the book, e-book, audiobook…choose what works for you and I’ll see you on the other side of the adventure the story will take you on!