WHO BUYS an anorak in a garage? Somebody must do because service stations always sell them. I will have a Twix, a Pot Noodle, two heavy bags of charcoal for the barbecue, one of those scented fir tree things, the Greatest Hits of Boyzone and an anorak please. Oh, and since I'm here I may as well have a tank of unleaded, too.

It is a simple point, I suppose, and I shouldn't struggle with it as I do - other people have different preferences to me.

And that means that while I am convinced that the latest in electronic books is going to be a commercial success, perhaps I am wrong. To me the electronic book is the answer to my holiday prayers. Perhaps to other people an electronic book is as attractive a consumer item as, well, an anorak from a garage.

For me holidays are for reading. Yes, mountains, lovely. Oh, look, there's an antelope. Mmmm, must go in the swimming pool later. But if you don't mind, for the time being I am just going to sit here and read.

Which means that I have to lug with me huge volumes.

Now, as I have had cause to explain before, I have a creed. “In the eternal struggle between the weight of a suitcase and the need to have a heavy book with you, the book must always, always win.”

This is made worse by chronic indecision. What if this first book on Martin Luther King turns out to be excellent? Then I will need the other two 1,000-page volumes. But if it's rubbish, I will be needing something else. It all adds up.

Which can be embarrassing when the suitcase is weighed at checkout. Yes, of course, I packed myself. What sort of a question is that? Who else on earth would pack all this stuff?

Now, however, things are different. Now I can say goodbye to those heavy-books-on-holiday blues. For now I have a Kindle, the electronic book reader launched by Amazon.

On my recent trip to Switzerland I took 15 books. Two volumes of the King biog (natch), a book on the Beatles, a Bill Bryson, a huge tome on Lincoln's Cabinet that I bet I don't read until 2015, a massive book on Robert Oppenheimer that my brother insists I read, and a bunch of other stuff. I didn't need it all. I wasn't going to read it all. Possibly I won't ever read it all. But it didn't matter because it added no weight and took up no space. It was a wonderful liberation.

The Kindle is a fabulous device. Thinner than a CD box and lighter than a paperback, it can be read in bright sunlight, is easy on the eyes, and even feels as if you are handling a book. You can keep up to 200 books on the machine at a time, leaving any others on your PC. The library of available books is growing all the time. What are you waiting for?

What you are waiting for, my wife explained to me, is a moment when you might conceivably need it.

My requirement for a device to help me carry large biographies of General de Gaulle on trips to Turkish beaches is, I accept, a niche one. For lots of people, paperbacks are perfectly serviceable and they don't want to have to charge up their book on the mains.

Fair enough but who asked their opinion?

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