His views on "older reading media" — a reference to books — may be a little extreme, but...

...Rick Gekoski's thoughts on how a Kindle transforms your life are spot-on:

I'm a rare book dealer, but since getting an e-reader older reading media seem awkward and cumbersome.

Here's an excerpt from Gekoski's column in a recent issue of The Guardian:

...as I discovered on our way to Heathrow, I had forgotten to take my Kindle. This has never happened to me before, for it is now so essential that I almost buy it a companion ticket. When it became clear, checking my bags for the third time, that I was now Kindle-less, I had a reaction so acute as to qualify, almost, as an anxiety attack. No Kindle? What was I going to do?

Read the article in its entirety here.

And, afterwards, read my post to understand why I am crazy about my Kindle Fire: "The best thing since sliced bread for book-lovers (a Facebook conversation)".

The Hunger Games: A "young adult" series that even adults will love

I gave up on Harry Potter halfway through the first book — a great series for children, I thought to myself, but not for grown-ups. (I was wrong about that, though — many of my students, who were in their twenties when the fifth book came out, were Potter fans. Years ago, I remember, one of them snapped at me in exasperation when I mentioned casually to her that Dumbledore dies in the sixth book. I had no idea at the time that she was mad about Harry & Co.)

As for Twilight, I couldn't get into it at all, probably because I don't get what people see in vampires. (Not since Bram Stoker's Dracula has anyone written a decent vampire novel, not even Anne Rice.)

I came to the conclusion that young adult novels are not for me.

Boy, has Suzanne Collins proved me wrong!

I have just finished reading Mockingjay, the third and final (sigh!) book in Collins's Hunger Games trilogy.

It was only some three weeks ago that I began the first book, The Hunger Games. As I got deeper into it, I couldn't wait to finish it and start on the second one, Catching Fire. And, then, go on to Mockingjay. The plotting throughout the series is superb and the dystopian future is evoked brilliantly. You also rush through the pages because in none of the books is there a single word that you will have to look up in a dictionary. Surely that is the hallmark of a great writer.

There were times when I was reading the books on my Kindle Fire on the bus back from work that I would forget where I was. Once I almost missed my stop. And when I discussed this with my young friend Nastassia Michael, who lives in Toronto, she said that the same thing once happened to her, too, on the subway!

The three books have been billed as young adult novels, but, really, they are for anyone who is passionate about reading, age no bar. You are sure to love, as I did, the old-fashioned story-telling skills on display in all three books.

Suzanne Collins has made her characters so believable — especially the three main protagonists: Katniss Everdeen, Peeta Mellark, and Gale Hawthorne — and she has told a tale so riveting that, after having completed the series, I am now eagerly looking forward to watching the movie based on the first book next week.

BATTLER: JENNIFER LAWRENCE PLAYS KATNISS EVERDEEN IN THE HUNGER GAMES.

UPDATE (March 28, 2012): The executive editor of Mint, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, writes in his column today that several important economic lessons can be gleaned from the Suzanne Collins trilogy. Read the column here: "The hunger games".

UPDATE (March 29, 2012): Hunger Games, the movie, is well-made and it deserved its blockbuster opening weekend — $150 m. at the U.S. box-office in three days— but the book does a much better job of describing the horrors of the savage games in which 24 young men and women are forced to fight to the death in a televised spectacle.

Why the Kindle Fire is the best thing since sliced bread for book-lovers (a Facebook conversation)

Ramesh Prabhu

Friday

What am I reading on my Kindle Fire now?

 ·  · Share

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  Pritha Ghosh, Sushmita Chatterjee and 5 others like this.
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    Sanhita Ghosh Congrats! Party! :D
    

    Friday at 1:50pm · 
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    Shiv Sujir So you have moved on to the 'e' side.
    

    Friday at 2:22pm ·  ·  1
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    Sharat Sareen is it good to use?? better than ipad for books??
    

    Friday at 4:03pm · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu Well, Sharat, I found the Kindle Fire to be the right size to read books on -- isn't the iPad a tad unwieldy to hold comfortably (like you would hold a book)? As for the reading experience itself, after just a few days of reading books and graphic novels on the Fire, it seems so natural now to turn on the Fire, tap on the image of the work I want to read, and keep tapping pages to move forward or back.
    
    I can choose from a variety of fonts, increase the font size of the text, go to maps (in the book about Cleopatra, for example) and pinch-zoom to view details. And, of course, I can tap on a word to get the definition instantly from the built-in dictionary.
    

    Saturday at 10:52am · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu Also, I can highlight text, add notes, bookmark pages. I think all these conveniences truly add to the pleasure of reading a book on the Fire.
    

    Saturday at 10:53am · 
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    Sharat Sareen Do the eyes get tired after sometime or is it just like reading a book?
    

    Saturday at 11:30am · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu No, not at all, Sharat. I can adjust the brightness to suit the light around me. And I can increase the size of the text to the point where I don't need to wear my reading glasses. Isn't that amazing?
    

    Yesterday at 10:58am · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu If you want to read about how the Kindle Fire stacks up against the iPad, here's an illuminating article from the Wall Street Journal: http://goo.gl/NF9Pd.
    

    Yesterday at 11:01am · 

• Also read: How e-readers will make life easy for us readers

UPDATE (June 26, 2013): The Kindle is now available on Amazon's India store. Here are the reviews, from today's Mint, of the Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle FireHD: "Here come the Kindles".

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. :-)