We all love secondhand bookshops, don't we – that heady pleasure of browsing through shelves, or rummaging through boxes to find vintage paperbacks and forgotten gems. I'm a particular fan of that secondhand bookshop heaven Hay-on-Wye, but I'm puzzled by the Hay bookseller Derek Addyman, who seems to have started a bizarre campaign to drive Kindles out of town.
"Booksellers here definitely want them banned," he told the Daily Mail, describing people "walking around with them" – or, as you might say, reading – as "robots in another world". According to Addyman, Kindles are "our enemy", they're "just a phase ... [which] won't last".
"Kindles have no place at this festival which is supposed to be a celebration of the written word," he added, "and books."
Maybe we should take Addyman's remarks with the customary pinch of salt – after all, Hay booksellers are famously good at drumming up publicity – but surely Kindles are, well, all about reading books.
Now some may be fearful of Amazon, and perhaps with good reason, but attacking people who read ebooks, or suggesting that ebooks aren't really books at all, is just plain silly. E-readers, which have been getting progressively better and cheaper, are not a phase. They are not the enemy of books, and neither are those of us who use them.
The pleasures of stumbling upon that book you never knew you wanted on a dusty shelf – a pleasure that no e-reader can ever replace – have always depended on the wisdom of booksellers, especially in the kind of ramshackle secondhand bookshop that I love. I wonder what's become of that wisdom in Hay?
