I may not qualify as a High Net Worth Individual (HNI in financial parlance) but I am a regular book buyer who often splurges rashly on books. (What innocent vices… in these times when Babus are talking of owning high rise, sea facing properties in Colaba!! I am talking of buying measly books!!) But the salesperson in Delhi’s Midland book shop in South Extension treats me like I am the richest guy who patronises his shop. I have often seen foreign diplomats and some famous faces browsing for books there. But in terms of expenditure per month, I top at least some of them; and hence the special service. The Missus who comes with me on these shopping expeditions, also buys a lot of books. Among book buyers who spend a proportion of monthly disposable income, probably we must rank somewhere up there. (I am not sure if the Ambanis are reading much. Anyone with good taste in books wouldn’t be building Antilla.)
I am not particularly known for preserving books. They lie inside a small room in my house in no particular order. I have fixed a nice music system (more about that later) and try to spend as much time in this cozy little den. But the busy life here affords me very little time to do that. Hence the number of unread books and unheard music keeps piling up.
I own a kindle now. For the benefit of those who look askance at the mention of it, let me explain. It is an e-book reader with a 6” screen. It has no touch screen interface and no colour display. It has a rather intrusive keyboard which can interfere while reading. It is light and easy to carry like a book or diary. With a nice leather cover (to be bought separately) it can be held like a book. It uses the E- Ink technology (Electronic Ink- the screen does not light up like an LCD screen) and hence causes very little strain on the eyes. The charge lasts almost two weeks and hence you need not worry about the screen dying on you and the frequent need for charging. The Kindle uses a format called mobi for storing books. Books stored in Kindle takes very little space since it doesn’t support colours. If you were thinking of reading the latest Playboy magazine in multicolour splendour, forget it. This is strictly for the printed stuff. It doesn’t work well as a web browser but has a smooth interface with Amazon website from which you can pay and download books into the Kindle.
Well, if you are reading this from a third world developing country I wouldn’t advise you to do that. If you are located outside the US of A, even free books might cost you $3 a pop if you download it from Amazon. There are smarter ways to do the same thing through a method which my son taught me. Since it may raise questions of copyright, ethics and legality, I shall refrain from elaborating further. (We might yet learn to be seasoned criminals from our sons!!)
Someone close to me brought it from the US. If you buy it in India you might end up paying a lot of extra on customs duties. (Ipods and TVs sell in India almost at international prices but not the Kindle- shows that we are not a reading country). It is cheap in the US ($139 for the Wi Fi only model and $189 for the 3G model). A nice leather cover might cost a few more dollars and bingo you are ready to go. Surprisingly I found the best write-up for Kindle users in a blog by Shekhar Govindarajan, an Indian software professional. I was impressed with the range of questions that have been answered there. I have also downloaded free software called e-calibre which is a good interface for storing and transferring books to your e-book reader in any format. There is also Gutenberg.org which contains most of the books on which copyright has expired. I have now a lot of books that I always wanted to read. In the first few days I kept downloading a lot of stuff without much thought. Now I am careful and download only stuff that I want to read in the near future. I am reading “Obama’s Wars” on the kindle right now. It is a well written book. But as always, the journalist’s (Bob Woodward) insight into the workings of power could be a bit over-dramatized.
It is not exactly easy to switch between books on the kindle. I do that a lot with the printed stuff. I try to go back to Tariq Ali’s latest tome on Pakistan. Then I try to catch up with Sue Grafton’s latest alphabet series novel (U for Undertow) and Michael Connelly’s “Reversal”- All this without paying a cent.
