Books vs Kindle

So Santa brought me a nice little surprise this year.. a Kindle Paper White! Now for a little while I’ve had conflicted opinions on Kindles. As a literature graduate and long term book lover, I will always have a place in my heart for dusty, dog-eared paperbacks. But then the convenience of carrying around loads of books at once, especially when travelling, is definitely one of the main appeals of using ebooks! And since my little brother bought himself a Kindle, my temptation has only increased.. So when I found one waiting for me on Christmas day I felt a little guilty, but pretty pleased. Plus my Mam got me this gorgeous little Orla Kiely case!

Now even though I had started to rationalise that it made sense to get a Kindle, (especially at the rate my library grows), to save space by only buying nice copies of the books I really love; I still felt a bit of a traitor. However, even after I unwrapped the Kindle, I still found myself with a lovely pile of old paperbacks including a couple from Hemingway and Hunter S Thompson.

A few months ago I wrote a post, Old fashioned bookshops vs Amazon, and since then I’ve made more of a conscious effort to shop in independent bookshops and rely less on Amazon. In fact since I wrote it, I’ve only ordered specialist (work-related) texts from Amazon. While the Kindle feels like a step away from this, I’m hoping it will only help to encourage me to carry on visiting more bookshops and only buy Kindle editions of books I want to read but may not necessarily want to own.. Or maybe it’s just a sign of the times changing; as I sit on a train to Edinburgh, blogging on my phone, surrounded by passengers reading ebooks. Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t think print is dead by any means. Not yet anyway.