Sounds clever - but it'll never catch on here

Date Published: 06-Aug-2010

THIS is either courageous, or foolhardly. I am about to express an opinion about the future of ‘them digital book yokes’ which some would have you believe are all the rage at the moment and on which there have been ceaseless feature pieces in newspapers in recent weeks.

Before taking my courage in my hands, I have to say that my record in this area of predicting what might be popular, or grab the public’s attention, is about as good as the Kerryman who, when confronted with decimal currency for the first time, said solemnly that it would ‘never catch on down this side of the country’.

Indeed, that might have been a little prophetic . . . at least for some time. For I do know of areas where they were still finding wads of ‘old currency’ up to a few short years ago. That currency, I believe, could be ‘cashed’ in places like the Central Bank.

In one case of which I am aware, some years ago a senior bank official was sent to a farmhouse in County Mayo to count money for an elderly couple who had hoarded the hard cash for years previously but got a bit nervous when there were some robberies of people in rural areas.

The bank official recalled that he and an assistant spent most of a night counting the best part of £30,000 in notes that even he had never seen . . . notes with ploughs on them, and such like, that hadn’t seen the light of day for decades as they lay under the mattress.

I know of another case in County Galway where the thieves robbed a house but missed out on £7,000 which was left under hay under a very cross ‘clocking’ turkey sitting on a clutch of eggs in a half oil-barrel. When the Gardaí counted the money, they encountered notes they had never seen before.

However, I digress . . . slightly. The point I was trying to make, if in a roundabout way, was that my record on predicting the future for electronic gadgets is not the best. I swore I would never own a mobile phone; I protested that I would never send an email; I believed Betamax format tape would dominate the world; and I could never see disc players being popular in cars, and ‘vinyl’ becoming an item only in music museums.

That said, can I venture to suggest that the new electronic books will prove popular – among the generation who have taken to phones with ‘apps’, but that for folk like me, they will never rival the sheer enjoyment of going to a bookshop, leafing through a series of possible choices, and finally taking a book home in a paper bag and setting down to read it.

I’m one of those who will take to a new book, especially a biography, but there are a number of firm favourites which seem to arise time after time, despite the presence of literally thousands of books in my garage, on shelves of bedrooms, in boxes in the attic, and the odd stray edition lying about the place for weeks on end.

The ones I keep going back to are books like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, To Kill A Mockingbird, the marvellous and tragic biography of Oscar Wilde by Richard Elliman, Lytton Strachey’s biography of Elizabeth I, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four and Keep The Aspidestra Flying, the collected short stories of Frank O’Connor, Hugh Leonard’s Home Before Night, and The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Now, there’s a diversity of choice which defies any logic, but then, mine is the kind of house where you walk into the garage and are confronted by the paperbacks bought over 40 years, hoarded in the meantime, dipped-into occasionally, and taking up half a house in space.

Each one was lovingly bought, following due consideration, in places like Kenny’s Bookshop, where I hid for days on end; picked up while idling in Eason’s (still known to me as O’Gorman’s), downstairs in Dubray’s in more recent years, or as a special treat while whiling away endless hours in Waterstone’s in Dublin.

Recently I saw a young man with all of the Harry Potter novels downloaded to his phone – and he sat there entranced listening to the entire saga. Now that’s what I call progress. And I speak as a man who swore he’d never own a mobile! Hope for me yet.