Smell An iPad

That musty smell  of a wood-panelled bookstore, that hunt for a rare title, the feel of the leather-­bound visage of a classic. To walk thr­o­ugh the maze of tall shelves, to dive into the crevices of a labyrinthine library, the joy of browsing for long hours. Well, all this may have a romantic ring to it but now the hunt for a coveted book is not so long-winded—in fact, it’s just a click away. Log on to one of the several websites, key in the book’s name, hit the search button, find, order and voila! It will get delivered to your doorstep in a matter of a couple of days. Not a muscle needs to be stretched anymore to reach out for a book you have hungered for long.

It’s cause for celebration for many a reader. Author and journalist Shabnam Minwalla enthusiastically recommends online book-shopping. A mother of three, she tells the story of her family’s quest for the third book in the Sisterhood of The Travelling Pants series. “I tried looking for it everywhere. Then one fine day I just gave up and went online and located it in a matter of minutes,” she says. As a young crime fiction junkie, she used to find it difficult to locate many titles of a series. “That won’t be the case with my daughters and it’s Flipkart and Amazon that has made it possible,” she says.

It’s not just to do with finding a book online. Technology has also changed the way we consume a book. Just dow­nload a book onto any smart device—a Kindle or an iPad—and you can start reading right away. This has led to a veritable reading revolution, whose demise pundits keep predicting at least once every decade. Reading is cool again. We are now consuming the written word at a speed and quantity which far surpasses any other era. That too with far fewer bookshops, public libraries or reading rooms. Simran Kaur, a young accounting professional, swears by her Kindle. “What is great about it is that you can carry as many books as you want.” And a boon for travellers. Also, they no longer need to occupy precious space in our tiny flats.

It doesn’t stop at iPads, tabs and Kindles alone. There are several products and apps to help us read on the go. Audiobooks are also making books more accessible. Simply push in a CD or pen drive and get an authentic reading or re-enactment of your favourite book. In fact, audio books have hit it so big that even flights have audio books loaded as a part of their on-board entertainment package.

But wouldn’t the magic of leafing through a book soon be a lost pleasure? Didn’t reading have more romance back then than the mechanised, antiseptic process it has become? Is nobody missing the smell of paper and ink—so diverse acr­oss age and publication? There are many who ref­use to give up on their sacred paperbacks and hardbounds.

Sumedh Natu, a young media professional, is one of them. He says the only way he can feel connected to a book is by feeling the texture of the physical paper while he reads it.

Amrita Tripathi, a writer, who is awaiting the launch of her new book, also prefers the touch of paper. “Rea­ding a physical copy is an experience that can’t be replicated,” she says. “While I would not discount the whole trend of reading on Kindle or listening to audiobooks, I personally prefer a physical copy,” she says, adding that she thinking of buying a Kindle to try it out.

Even as there has been a substantial change in the way we read, there has also been a shift in what we are reading. One can no longer say today that only novels, plays or poetry constitute literature. From five-word stories to 5,000-page books, the amount of material available is astoundingly diverse; literature, too, has undergone a semantic expansion to include experimental genres. Lipi Mehta, a young blogger who runs ‘The Reader’, a website that provides commentary on literature and reading trends, says: “Literature now doesn’t just mean fat books with difficult words. Graphic novels, internet essays, articles and even one-line stories can now be called literature”.  Online writings like ‘Terribly Tiny Tales’ that tells stories in two lines and Twitter stories in 140 characters are popular.

There is even a Twi­tter account solely dedicated to retelling the one lakh shlokas of the Mahabharata through tweets. “A lot more people want to write today and they are finding an avenue on the internet,” says Pallavi Krishnan, a former publishing professional. “Inter­net is the fastest, as well as the cheapest, informer and entertainment channel in present times.” According to Sumedh Natu, more people are finding articles on the internet that they can relate to, thus swarming towards them. His blog gets the most hits from students of the university he went to and the most-read are about college life or pop culture.

As with music, which has come a long way from LP records, spool tapes, cassettes, discs, pen drives and Blue Ray to wearable music in a watch, the format of the book may have changed from what Johannes Gutenberg published in the 1450s. Yet, its transformative impact on humanity increases with time.