It´s three in the afternoon. The late March sun is beating down on the stretch of Prithvi Highway at Ghansikuwa, Tanahun. There is a tourist bus parked by the road, a couple of mechanics, their bodies smeared with grease here, there, everywhere, are hard at work to replace one of the punctured tires. Inside the bus, four young Americans are discussing books, their animated discussion sparked by a passenger reading on his Kindle.
"I am not sold on it either,” a clean-shaven freshman in navy green ‘Kathmandu’ t-shirt chimes in, responding to a disapproving comment on the e-reader from one of his friends. “But makes a whole lotta sense if you are travelling.” His companion in crew cut, who sports a humongous Buddha-tattoo that spans the whole of his left shoulder, nods in agreement. "But I prefer the good’ol pulp, thank you,” it’s the turn of the blonde with big, round glasses. “At the end of last semester, I shut myself for a fortnight, going through the entire Harry Potter series. I am not sure I would have had the same enthusiasm were I straining my eyes over an electronic device." Meanwhile, the guy hunched over his Kindle completely loses the plot courtesy this chattering bunch of yanks.
But it gets the poor sod thinking. He reckons this scene could be playing out in passenger vehicles right across the world as people are being forced to make the tough choice between the paper (the musty aroma of the pulp, the grainy feel of each folio) and the various e-platforms for reading. Last Thursday, Barnes & Noble debuted with an e-reader with a screen that can glow in the dark, only adding to the dilemma of booklovers agonizing over a likely switch. For eager readers in Nepal, such a device could be manna from heaven, forced as they are to grumble and grouse in darkness for long hours, the dim lights powered by puny invertors clearly insufficient for their highly myopic eyes.
Insiders on the e-book business believe it won’t be long before Apple and Amazon, B&N’s two big rivals in the e-reader market, come out with similar versions of their own. It makes business sense. As the convenience of e-book readers continues to outweigh the aesthetical allure of paper, the number of readers of the e-format is bound to increase by leaps and bounds. Even in Nepal, it’s not just publishers in English who will vie for a share of the growing e-book pie. In 2011, Narayan Wagle became the first novelist in Nepali language to release his novel in e-format.
As more Nepalis get accustomed to reading on electronic platforms, this trend will only intensify. Way back in the first century BC, Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero compared a room without books to a body without a soul. Yes, it is indeed hard to match the sex appeal of leather-bound Shakespeare linking up oak-paneled bookshelves. But the robust arguments of utilitarians for a little device that can pack in as many as 1,200 (and growing) volumes would be increasingly hard to dismiss either.
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