How e-readers will make life easy for us readers

Sure, you can store a few thousand books in an e-reader but what will the "reading" experience be like? That is the question haunting book-lovers such as myself. And that is why I devoured every word of Altaf Tyrewala's article on his e-reading experience in a recent Tehelka.

In "My electric nights with Vikram Chandra", Tyrewala first takes us back to 2006 and the launch of Vikram Chandra's epic bestseller, Sacred Games. "At nearly a thousand pages," writes Tyrewala, "Chandra's was the fattest novel by an Indian-origin writer in recent years."

The book was a critical and commercial success, but Tyrewala says he persisted in his refusal to read the novel. He explains:

As a writer living and working in Mumbai, I’d established a rule: if a book couldn’t be carried into the city’s overcrowded suburban trains during rush hour, it did not merit my readership. It was a self-defeating middle-class snootiness, precluding my enjoyment of hundreds of masterpieces, but anyone who has endured the horror of those daily train rides will know that you cannot shrink yourself enough on a 6.08 pm Virar fast. A thousand-page book like Sacred Games belonged elsewhere, in a world of wide roads and spacious homes and peaceful rides in climate-controlled modes of public transport.

Later in the article, we learn about Tyrewala's e-reader:

I've been using one of these gizmos for a month, and can already see how it has begun renegotiating my assimilation of written material. This is the first month of my adult life that I haven’t purchased physical books. Where usually there would be a pile of volumes comprising my current (non)reading list strewn around the house, there now sits a single slim paperback-sized plastic device containing 10 downloaded e-books, and the capacity to hold hundreds more.

Tyrewala then discusses some of the problems with the technology:

Many of the books that I’ve been seeking to dive into for years aren’t available in the digital format as yet.... The e-book technology is still new and the reservoir awaiting digitisation is staggeringly vast. ... The search is no longer for books, but for digitally downloadable titles capable of being read on my e-reader. Given the limited choices, there is still joy in the hunt and relish in one’s find.

And he also looks into the crystal ball:

A more reliable understanding of e-reading habits and their effects will emerge a few months or years later. Can e-book stores remain immune to chain-store profusion? Will the e-reader surmount our growing inability to concentrate? It is inevitable that the ease of downloading titles will eventually devalue books, the way digitisation has made music and films pedestrian. ... There’s no telling how things might pan out in the long run. E-readers could prove critics wrong and not be the death of reading.

But Tyrewala is happy about one aspect:

For now, at any rate, the e-reader is accomplishing its task satisfactorily: it has got jaded writers like me reading again — and not just any old book, but the elephantine and intimidating Sacred Games.

Can there be a better argument in favour of e-readers?

Read Tyrewala's intelligent, witty, and visionary piece in its entirety here: "My electric nights with Vikram Chandra".

• Illustration courtesy: Tehelka/Sudeep Chaudhuri

• UPDATE (December 25, 2011): I bought a Kindle Fire last week. And now I think, for book-lovers, it's the best thing since sliced bread. Read my post here.

• UPDATE (October 10, 2013): I finally have my own e-version of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, bought on Amazon.in for Rs.99. :-)