Reading may seem the simplest of activities – eyes; words; brain. But, like eating, it gets much more complicated when you look at it more closely. The way you eat a Sunday lunch and the way you eat a sandwich at your desk at work bear only a faint resemblance to one another; the TV dinner at home is not the candlelit date; breakfast is not lunch.

And so with reading, we increasingly understand. You read an instruction manual for a lawnmower differently from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. You scan your paper with an efficiency and utilitarianism you don’t deploy for a good novel. You read differently at home and at work and on the train or bus. The shifts are subtle. But subtlety, in a bewildering world of media revolutions, is more than ever critical.

That’s why I’ve become a huge convert to the Kindle, the little, thin plastic tablet produced by Amazon and designed for the reading of books. I am an unlikely convert. Although I love the internet, I love books too. I love the feel and smell of them, the designs, the fonts, the scribbling in the margins, the indexes, the ability to curl up on the sofa on a weekend afternoon and get lost for a while in a paperback. Of all my possessions, books come first. Yes, I’m a web junkie; yes, I was one of the very first bloggers almost 10 years ago; yes, I haul around my laptop everywhere. But books? I thought I could never live without them.

I thought wrong. The Kindle is about the size and weight of a small 30-page hard-back children’s book. When you switch it on you expect to see the usual glow of a computer screen. But you don’t. What pops up looks more like an old Etch A Sketch – but infinitely clearer. The text – rendered by a new technology that I have no way to understand – is black on off-white and there is no light coming from the screen. It reads better in bright sunlight, just like a book. And in the dark you can’t read it at all, just like a book.

And you read it just like a book. It was only when I curled up and read an entire book on it that I realised why this is so different from other forms of new media. When you read online you are poised for interaction. Most internet reading occurs in the workplace (the peak hours of a blog are lunchtime, when bored lawyers and office workers check in for an update) or at a desk. Even a laptop on your knees becomes an instant ersatz desk. Your attitude is geared towards quick satisfaction – browsing research or blog posts or breaking news or shopping or porn or stocks.

If you’re anything like me, when you come upon a lengthy article online you tend not to read past the first screen-scroll. There’s something about the internet that makes you impatient. No one wants to read a lengthy essay on a screen at a desk. I’ve found, for example, that the maximum length of video that people want to watch online is around three minutes. That makes it very different from the television experience as we have known it.

The Kindle, unlike laptop or PC prose, is read in an armchair or a sofa or on the train. You can read it while holding it up with one hand. You can lie down and read it perched on your lap. Although it’s connected to the internet and you can buy a book and start reading it within a minute by pressing one button, it doesn’t facilitate web-surfing. It is not an iPhone. It doesn’t text. It brings you words, plainly packaged. The words, by their very plainness – like the plainness of a book’s print – demand respect. By removing some of the peripheries of reading – the shop, the cover design, the author photograph – the words seem to acquire more solitary authority.

I found that, unlike reading online, I was never tempted to open a new web window to appease my restless short attention span. For a blog addict like me, always vowing to get back on the wagon of a web-free life for a few hours a day, it’s a godsend. If there’s a long article you find online that you want to read later, you can e-mail it to your Kindle and read it later in the manner most appropriate.

I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to make notes, highlight and underline passages. But the Kindle lets you do that using a mini-mouse – and your notes are then helpfully compiled in an appendix at the end. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to remember where I stopped reading last; the Kindle automatically remembers and takes you there. Looking for a detail you’d already read? Unlike a paper book, the Kindle can search the text for you.

Think of it as minimalist reading. Then consider this: you can store 1,500 books on the current model. You can walk around with the equivalent of one paperback that, like some bibliophile’s Tardis, contains your entire library. In the future it’s perfectly possible to imagine a device with access to Google Books, allowing you to download a world of knowledge, to read out-of-print books, to peruse texts that would otherwise have gathered dust in library vaults. And the price of each book is roughly half what you’d pay for a physical copy made of dead trees.

After your initial reluctance, even abhorrence, you see why this technology will almost certainly make the publishing industry as we have known it extinct. The Kindle’s price, about £220, will surely come down and its limited range of books – all of which can be obtained only from Amazon – will grow. But even at the current price you save money after a while by purchasing cheaper books.

Will books disappear? Unlikely. Like dead-tree newspapers they will merely be displaced. In some niches they are booming. One of the more interesting statistics in the United States this year was the news that in the first quarter more book titles were published by print-on-demand “amateurs” than by the mainstream publishing industry. Affordable, print-on-demand vanity publishing is now here. If you’ve got a blog with a decent readership, you’ve got a publishing house. Just send your prose to a print-on-demand company, design the thing yourself in a few easy steps online and click. Then sell, if you want. Or give away.

In some ways the online world has reinforced the joy of books. The best reading is not useful reading; it is useless. The Kindle is the first thing to annex technology for this uselessness: the joy of a comic novel, the journey of a historical biography, the diversion of a short story. Trust me: this took me by surprise. It will probably do the same to you.

www.andrewsullivan.com

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