A month ago
I found an advertisement for a severely underpriced brand new Kindle e-reader.
I immediately drove away to a very common small house in Rinkaby, a village
outside Kristianstad. When I rang the doorbell a man in his early fifties
opened, dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt. He was somewhat fat, but tall and
strong-looking. He spoke in short sentences and showed no intention to
socialise with his Kindle’s new owner. A woman, probably his wife, stood in the
kitchen cooking some kind of simple modern magazine-style food. She was about
his age or some years younger, with blonded hair and wearing a tank-top that
exposed her buxom arms and large portion of her breasts. The kitchen looked like it had been renovated recently. Surely this didn’t seem to be a proper place for a
reading pad and the man and the woman seemed to be sensible enough to get rid
of it as rapidly and as simply as possible.
I thought
it was a happy example of well-functioning capitalism, an e-reader changing
owners from people who don’t read books to people who read books. So I
carelessly placed it in my gas-guzzling Volvo 850 and drove home, without
thinking that an e-reader could have its own sensibilities. As soon as we came
home it showed me it had. Every time I didn’t turn the page for a few minutes,
it showed me a picture. A black-and-white photo of pencils, ink on paper, ink
in a small bottle, pens, types, building blocks with letters on…The picture
stood out from the old sofa where I had put the Kindle away from me. It also
didn’t fit in among the scattered papers and books and cables and pencils on my
desk. Neither among the carelessly potted plants in my window frame. Nor on the
floor next to the dehumidifier.
No, the
Kindle signalled it wanted to be in a better home. A home with light colours,
clean open spaces and furniture with straight modern lines. It could also think
of lying on an old-fashioned, heavy oak-desk when not being read on. A home
with a mixture of things which just happen to be there? Forget about it. A home
with traces of children? No-no. A tidy home with flowery curtains and a painting
of a lake and an elk on the wall? Don’t even think about it.
“Hey,
you’re just a gadget”, I thought. “You don’t have the right to decide who
should own you. I bought you with real money, although less than I should”. So
the fight begun. I hacked it to get rid of the pictures, but then the e-reader answered
by devouring the battery. I tried to hide it, but then I couldn’t find it when
I needed it. Gradually we developed a more stable balance of terror consisting
of low-intense contempt for each other. Do you also have an e-reader who longs
to a better place? Please share your experience with me.
