Ten things you can’t do with a Kindle – Katherine Roberts

My interview with history boy Ian Mortimer last month suggests that the physical book is still the preferred format for historians, despite the rise of ebooks in other genres. But even if reading them goes out of fashion, physical books can still be used for many other things. For a bit of bank holiday fun, here's my top ten list of things you can’t do with an e-reader:

1. Decorate your living room. Well, I suppose you could… but a row of e-readers sitting on the shelf doesn’t have quite the same potential for colour co-ordination when you change your curtains.

2. Open a secondhand bookshop and spend happy hours browsing the shelves for out-of-print gems. Ebooks never go out of print - where's the fun in that?

3. Press flowers. You need a hefty tome for this, and I find historical non-fiction works very well. Here is “Wonders of the Past” complete with pressed primroses from my lawn (I haven't cut the grass lately...!)

4. Book crossing. At least, not unless people start a craze for leaving Kindles in cafes with whole libraries and their amazon credit details loaded...

5. Sign a copy. Yes, I know there’s such a thing as digital signing but it’s really not the same as meeting your readers and personally defacing their book, is it?

6. Smell it. Ah, that musty “old book” smell! I have a friend who won’t buy a book unless he’s had a good sniff first, rather like people who won’t buy flowers unless they are scented – though no doubt it won’t be too long before e-readers come with a synthetic range of smells.

7. Eat it. If you’re a bug, obviously – the larvae of the death watch beetle and common furniture beetle can feed on books. Although one of my school friends used to tear off the corners of pages and chew them when she got bored in lessons. (Perhaps I’ve just got weird friends?)

8. Burn it. Book bonfires can be used for political or religious oppression. Hitler burned books that challenged the Nazi regime. Others have burned Korans and Bibles and other holy books. Burning Kindles might be top of some people’s lists, but it wouldn't really have the same effect and I doubt they would smell as nice as 6.

9. Rest your feet on it. Being a bit of a short-ass, two “Wonders of the Past” volumes are just right to prop up my feet when my chair is raised to the right height for my keyboard.

10. Drop it in the bath. This is my copy of Philip Pullman’s “Amber Spyglass” after being dropped into hot foamy water while I was reading it in the bath. I dried it out on a radiator and finished the story, then put it on my bookshelf (in the orange section) where it is currently decorating my study… see 1.

So what do you do with your paper books, besides read them?

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