For my birthday last year I got a Kindle. I’ve both wanted an E-Reader for years, but I’ve always been put off them due to the DRM and associated restrictions. But last summer, I spent a lot of time on the move, often passing through 4 countries in a day, and I just couldn’t carry enough books for the amount I read. So eventually I caved and ordered the basic Kindle model with money my family gave me for my Birthday.
The post arrived, I opened the package eager to play with my new toy. I sat on my bed with this shiny grey object, fresh with possibilities. I sat there with the kindle store open on the device and froze. What should I read? Standing in a book shop could be the very definition of option paralysis. Only here I don’t have the shelves of pretty covers, all neatly sorted into categories. Just a text box and a cursor.
I tried typing a few things into the search box. “Iain M Banks”, “Peter F Hamilton”, “Sci-Fi”. The first two gave me some results by those authors, some I’ve read, a few I haven’t, but mostly stuff that was more than I wanted to spend on my first books to explore what the Kindle can do. The 3rd of those searches gave me thousands of results. Thousands of indistinguishable, unrecognised, unfamiliar titles.
I needed to narrow this down a bit. So I thought I’d see if I could find some Sci-Fi with a lesbian character. I selected the text box, and accidentally deleting the “sci-fi” already in there, typed in “Lesbian”, and hit search.
I regretted it.
If you want an idea of the results that come up, you can click this link. You may not want to do it on your work computer tho. Pages upon pages of results for what is essentially soft core porn in written form. Most of it obviously targeted at men, and obviously written by men. The cover images don’t give much hope. No matter what I played with in the search box, I couldn’t get anywhere with the search function, beyond the porn. I just couldn’t find a Sci-fi novel with a lesbian character using the search box alone.
I turned to google and had a search around for various recommendations for lesbian sci-fi. Which allowed me to find something to read.
What I realised from this experience is that what the Kindle really needs is a good Librarian. I’m fortunate, I have friends who are librarians of various forms (academic, public etc…), and they’ve always been helpful in finding me something to read. But not everyone is this fortunate.
So the search function on Kindles isn’t great, that’s hardly news. The thing is there is a wider issue here. Public libraries have been facing cuts across the UK as austerity bites and councils see this as an easy way to save money. Many councils have tried to get volunteers to run their libraries, getting rid of full time qualified librarians. And this is a problem.
It’s a problem that comes from a general lack of understanding of what a library is. For many it’s a building with some books in. Simple as that. I’ve even seen councillors and the media saying “Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to give everyone a subscription to Kindle Unlimited”. This shows a total lack of comprehension of what a library does and how it works.
A library is a curated collection of resources (not just books), and the librarian is the guide to that collection. Don’t know what to read? Go to your local library and ask the librarian for a suggestion. Like a book by a certain author? Tell the librarian and they’ll be able to help you find something similar (they will often consult Who Writes Like?). Want to know about Ship building in medieval Britain? Ask a librarian, they’ll be able to give you a list of books and resources that can help you (A search a librarian recently did for me).
A library without a librarian however is like staring at the blinking cursor in the search box, a world of information so near, yet out of reach.
Buying a Kindle made me realise just how much we all need Librarians, and libraries. Society needs to remember this, before it’s too late, before they’ve all been replaced by warehouses of books with no guide.
I love my kindle, it just needs a good librarian.
Ook.
Post script: If, like me, you’re looking for something to read which is perhaps break from the hetronormative, you may enjoy: