Beating the Reader's Block by Sanjay Sipahimalani

A few weeks ago, I was afflicted by a nasty ailment. Reader's block.

Try as I might, I was unable to concentrate on a book - any book - for more than a paragraph or two, sometimes not even that much. The last time this happened to me was, as I recall, eons ago, after studying for a grueling bachelor's degree. (In commerce, in case anyone's asking).

Then, of course, it was because of reading too much about the many advantages of double-entry book keeping, combined with several unsuccessful attempts to tally balance sheets. This time around, I was at a loss to ascertain a cause.

Perhaps it was because I'd recently raced through too many novels in an attempt to meet review deadlines. Perhaps it was that, under the solemn influence of Literature with a capital L, I was picking up books with no semblance of plot. Perhaps it was just too hot to read.

A friend wrote to say he'd treated a similar ailment by swallowing a dime western or two. This cured him completely, but with the unfortunate side-effect that he read nothing else for the next six months.

It was at this time, as I was searching the shelves for the Conan Doyles and Wodehouses, that I found myself in possession of a Kindle. (Yes, I know I'm late to the party, but then I've never been what marketers like to call an 'early adopter'.)

At first, I was wary of it, especially since, even after being plugged in for charging, it did nothing but lie there, alone and palely loitering. Finally, it registered signs of life.

I had toyed with a friend's Kindle before, but an issue of Newsweek was the only thing of interest I'd found on his device. Since one of the chief reasons to own a Kindle in India, I'd always thought, was to instantly access titles that you wouldn't otherwise come by at your garden-variety bookshop, I began to browse the online store with great expectations.

That was the first disappointment. Elif Batuman's The Possessed? Not available. Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey? Not available. David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet? Not available. Even The New Yorker isn't available for download if you're in India. (India Today is, if that makes you feel better.)

Not being well-versed in the fine arts of digital rights management, I have no idea if the above and more will be made available soon - indeed, whether there will be a time when we can share e-books the way we do books. Be that as it may, there are of course heaps of other titles to download, as I found to my delight, hastily acquiring Paul Murray's Skippy Dies and Alberto Manguel's A Reader on Reading. (A nice touch of irony, reading about someone who'd devoted his life to the printed word on an e-book reader.)

It occurred to me shortly after that there's so much to fiddle with that it can take a while before you actually get down to what the Kindle is designed for. After every page, I began to change the font size as well as the number of words to a line. Then I started to worry that having the wireless on all the time would affect battery life, so I experimented with switching it on and off. After that I tried to work out how the annotations and clippings worked. Then I realised that I hadn't paid any attention to what I was actually reading, and so went back to the beginning.

At this point, I recalled that there are loads of free e-books out there to download, too. So back to the Kindle Store I went, and discovered authors from Dickens to Kafka to Austen that could be acquired for the princely sum of 0.00, payable in US dollars.

Over the next few nights, I settled down to actually perusing the words on the screen, and now, two things became evident. First, the ability to immerse oneself in a book, to lose oneself in the "vivid and continuous dream" that John Gardener wrote about, is linked to familiarity with the medium itself - that is, printed words on a page. With the Kindle, you're all too aware of the strangeness of it: the awareness that you're reading it is always at the forefront.

Second, and linked to the above, that little blurred flash of black that occurs whenever you turn a page is distracting. The split-second it takes for the e-ink to settle down is enough to once more remind you that it's not a book you're holding but an alien device.

These impediments recede with time, and while it would be going too far to say that I tuned them out altogether, they did lose much of their power to distract -- despite other obvious drawbacks such as the greyness and one-font-fits-all attribute.

In my case, acceptance was also hastened by the black leather cover that makes holding the Kindle more akin to holding a book. (Perhaps I ought to keep a printed book next to me while reading on the Kindle so that every now and then I can pick it up and sniff it. That aroma is another one of the things that the Kindle cannot replicate, unless they invent scratch-and-sniff screens.)

The Kindle, based on my experience so far, will always remain for me a supplement to the printed book and not a replacement. I can't see myself wanting to swap the books on my shelves with e-books in the manner of someone replacing vinyl or tape with CDs, for instance. A supplement, yes, but one that's convenient, handy and - dare I say it -becoming irreplaceable.

And so it came to pass that after all the fiddling I realised I'd not only re-read half of Kafka's The Trial -- in an indifferent translation -- but also made significant inroads into the Murray and the Manguel. I'd found the remedy to my reader's block, and it had nothing to do with a printed book.