I’ve taken my Kindle to book clubs, answered questions about it on the subway, and found myself in countless conversations about the aesthetic and economic implications of the growing e-reader market. I’ve stopped being surprised at how passionate people are about their reading preferences, their fears about the digital future, and their suspicions about the pleasures of reading electronic ink. I think these are exciting conversations to have, and in the course of talking so much about e-books, I  realized that even though I’ve always been a book lover, I stopped being a book buyer a long time ago.  What’s more, I’ve realized that I have a much more enjoyable relationship with e-books now than I’ve had with real books for years.

When I transitioned out of my PhD program in English literature about ten years ago, I had approximately a gadzillion books. I loved them all, and dutifully schlepped them from apartment to apartment, California to Colorado, on my quest to find a job I loved in a place I liked. I also just kept buying, reading, and collecting. My shelves were so stuffed that one of the main reasons I loved a weird little duplex apartment I rented was a set of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves set into the walls of its weird little office. I bought, I read, and I collected.

A few years into being a non-academic, I started to wonder about what was at the heart of my incessant booklust. I thought a lot about those growing (and dusty) stacks of books. When I got really honest with myself, I realized that the heart of my book buying ways was vanity. Really. It was. I wanted to be acknowledged as a reader, and thinker, and owner of fine and funky books. Regardless of how anyone might feel about my taste, I wanted to be recognized as a voracious reader. I also wanted the validation of being surrounded by the objects that I had studied so intensively for so long. Books were comfortable. And they made me feel better about myself. (Mind you, I am not suggesting that either vanity or validation is at the heart of your booklust, should you possess it. It wasn’t even the reason I started loving books, but it became the reason I relentlessly hung on to them.)

So I decided to let them go. I gave almost all of them away. I allowed myself to keep one small bookcase of my very favorites, and boxed up some classics, anthologies and academic texts for deep storage. After that, nearly everything I read was borrowed – either from the library or friends. I was lucky enough to be living in Denver at the time, because the Denver Public Library is one of the finest libraries in the country, and I had virtually no problem reading anything I wanted whenever I wanted (or after a very short wait).

Becoming a book borrower instead of a book buyer was super significant for me. It re-aligned my relationship to words and stories, and moved me beyond my attachment to books as both physical objects and symbols of my intellect or capabilities. It helped inform my anti-clutter sensibilities, and bolstered my desire to own less stuff, in general.

When I moved to Brooklyn, I continued to borrow – from the library and from friends. I ended up buying a few more books after joining book clubs (and also feeling the knee-jerk compulsion that most people in new cities often have to fill up their new space with something comfortable and known) but not very many. And then (as some of you know) I started having a lot of problems with my back. So Ehren gave me a Kindle as a holiday gift this last year, mostly because he didn’t want me to have to ouch around the subway, lugging books. And it’s pretty much one of the most thoughtful and loving gifts anyone has every given me.

There some downsides to the Kindle (all e-readers are evolving and all of them have problems), but the upsides have been tremendous. Chief among them is, of course, that I can carry around a bunch of books without having to carry them at all. It’s great to be able to share books with Ehren, too. But I’ve also found my reading experience greatly enriched: I’m highlighting passages, taking notes, and looking up words in books these days, which is something I haven’t done for years. Yes, instead of decreasing the aesthetic pleasure of reading, my Kindle has actually activated a more engaged relationship with books than I’ve had since I left academia. And you know what? I buy more books now that I own a Kindle than I have in the past seven years as a library fangirl. Let me say that again, differently: I make more purchases from the publishing companies that are currently freaking out about e-readers than I did before e-readers were even invented – even despite the fact that I continue to get a lot of my e-books for free. I love the convenience of being able to buy an e-book (typically cheaper than print versions) and download it immediately. I love being able to read many of them at the same time, too.  I realize that I might not represent the majority here, but my experience suggests that not all e-book readers have the same desires or the same habits. The truth of the matter is that I’m still not a book buyer, but I am an e-book buyer.

(Let me say here that I’m also a tech savvy gal who knows about the difference between buying a book from Amazon and buying a license for a book from the company, and I’ll look forward to discussing that issue in a future post.)

I recently showed my Kindle to my mother and my grandmother. Both are tech adverse, and yet both women were compelled by a single, important feature: the ability to increase the text size to gigantic proportions. I’ve also had conversations with older folks on the subway about this. After seeing the large font in action, one man declared to me, “Well, that settles that. I’m getting one.” Have you seen how unbelievably big and heavy large print books are? I write about this because we assume, somehow, that the physical objectness of the book is at the core of the pleasure of reading – but it seems, in fact, to be an obstacle for many. So I’m excited about how e-readers will enhance my experience as I become an older reader, too.

So there you have it… Girl meets Kindle.  Girl names it Kindle McMurtry. Girl reads more, reads more deeply, and reads more books that she actually purchased than before she met Kindle.  It’s a love story.