Slide and Prejudice | An ode to my Kindle

Two train rides in and I consider it a miracle to have finished 25 percent of If You Can’t Stand The Heat (Poppy Markham: Culinary Cop) by Robin Allen. Between phone calls, Whatsapp messages and the rush hour crowd knocking the phone out of my hands, one can't dismiss the discomfort of physically reading a book on my 3.7” display screen. 

I like the Kindle app for different devices, though I don’t like reading books on my phone. It’s a bit of a betrayal to my Amazon Kindle ebook reader. But then again, my friends told me it was the ultimate betrayal to the smell of books when I bought my device two years ago. Of course, I dismissed their blind devotion to physical books, choosing instead to harp on about the device’s absence of backlight, pencil thin body, the thesaurus that came installed, and the fact that the battery lasted for 30 days on a single charge.

Since I’ve owned my beauty- never named her unfortunately, she’s managed to accumulate and store over 30 books. Many of the reviews on this blog were written after experiencing different worlds – magical, mythical, real, surreal – in e-carbon ink. That was until a few weeks ago when I let the battery get so low that it refused to come back on. When I googled it, I learned that if you slide the power button and held it for over a minute, the system would reboot. And voila! Reboot she did. Or at least only a small crack in her corner did. The rest of her is still hijacked by the Jane Austen screensaver.

The time was ripe to find a Kindle service centre, an impossible task it would seem, since Amazon never officially launched in Mumbai.

“Are you travelling to the US anytime soon?” I tried my luck with some well-heeled friends.

“Nope.” “Nada.” “Erm…” “December 2013.”

My matchbox-sized room can’t handle any more books and I’m really not in the mood to replace a device to which I’ve grown so attached. But I can’t keep away from books forever, can I? Because if this experience has taught me anything, it's that we’ve read books in different shapes, forms and sizes -- pocket classics, coffee table books, anthologies, trilogies and novellas. But if you allow that to change their functionality in your mind's eye, you will never read again.

For now, the Kindle app on my mobile will just have to do. In a forthcoming post I shall also write about my experiences of reading and reviewing If You Can’t Stand The Heat (Poppy Markham: Culinary Cop) by Robin Allen on mobile.

After all, some of the same friends who scorned me for selling out to the tablet revolution two years ago just asked me, “Why don’t you just buy an iPad?” Maybe this is something I'll get used to? Or maybe I'll go blind.  

On the bright side, I think I finally have a name for my Kindle: Hello Jane, please don’t die on me.

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