As we approach the next issue I thought I'd drop in Elsbeth's editorial as, once again, she's nailed an interesting subject that may well have crossed your mind. I'd like to think the 'guy-thing' was meant to have a lower case 'g', although I have to admit I've been tempted to buy an iPad:

Did you notice the UK launch of the iPad a couple of months ago? It was accompanied by the usual media frenzy although I didn’t see many women in the photographs of over-excited purchasers of the latest, perhaps best-yet electronic tablet. How much of this feverishness is a gadget-driven guy-thing, I wonder?

To be fair, I’ve not spent much time with electronic books yet myself, so maybe I’m a convert waiting to happen. The closest I’ve come so far is looking at the Kindle bought for a family member with diminishing eyesight. Previously all she could read were large-print titles from the library but now she can download anything she likes on to her electronic book and then increase the type size as large as she wants. Quite an advance.

With reading devices becoming ever more prominent, I was interested to read a recent newspaper article (by a man) expressing concerns about the experience. One of these was the absence of knowing where you are in a book – how far in, how far to go. With an ebook, apparently there are always precisely six more pages in front of you: disconcerting, surely, when you want to know if you can finish the book in a sitting, or are going to have to pause at the end of the next chapter.

Another, rather more significant objection concerned libraries. With a tablet, in order to read, you generally have to buy, not borrow. Nor can you lend your purchases, unless you lend your ebook along with them. How will this affect the social value of reading, the sharing and lending of favoured reads? And how much will it undermine the whole notion of libraries, institutions which many of us – as polls confirm – hold very dear, and which have greatly assisted the growth of reading groups?           

But the article’s final point was the one that preoccupied me most. The journalist pointed out the distractions of reading on an iPad or similar. Not only might the book itself be interactive, but all the time you are reading it, you also have the opportunity to check out some other website or publication, even the weather. What, he wonders, will happen to the simple business of reading when the ‘book’ itself proposes so many distractions? An old-fashioned, inert, paper text offers a calm, temptation-free experience. It doesn’t want you to do anything else but read it.

I begin to see the world divided into two groups (by age, or gender, or custom): the hoppers and the squatters. For those of us who like to zip and zap with our remote controls and smart phones, a reader that can perform many other tricks simultaneously is going to be pretty darn attractive. But for those of us who only multi-task out of necessity, who look at reading as a delicious retreat from interactivity, the simplicity of paper pages and one-thing-at-a-time may offer a last respite from digital clamour.

I think I know which camp I’m in.