Kindle is an e-reader designed by the popular multinational technological company Amazon which has achieved widespread success within a few years of being released in the market. The device, although originally released in the year 2007, has already been extremely popular among readers throughout the world and its popularity has skyrocketed especially during the pandemic.
Bangladesh is not far behind when it comes to adopting the trends of e-readership which is gradually replacing the traditional approach of owning and reading paper books throughout the world. Kindle took Bangladesh by a storm last year when, due to the pandemic, a lot of people picked up Kindle, as a slightly quirky and different way of reading books and ever since then, the readership has kept growing.
Mashaekh Hasan, a student majoring in Anthropology at BRAC University, started using Kindle during the pandemic. While talking to the writer about his experience, he said, "One of my hobbies is watching book-review videos on YouTube. Most of the recommended books being international, purchasing the books seemed like a big deal. After having received an Amazon Kindle as a birthday gift, my habit of book-hoarding significantly reduced, not to mention the increase in the number of books I'm done with reading.”
“In the last year, I have read more than 100 books, seventy of which I read on Kindle. Considering the instant accessibility to ebooks, Kindle for sure changed my habit of reading a lot. Yes, it's an upward curve," he added.
Like Mashaekh, a lot of Kindle users have found book reading to be way less hectic compared to the past due to the fact that reading books have come down to the screen, unlike in the past when paper books were the norm and it was significantly difficult to carry a lot of books at the same time, which due to the arrival and rapid use of Kindle has become an easy task.
Umam Islam, a student at the University of Dhaka, has echoed the same sentiment. He said in this regard, "I really don't like the fact that people keep romanticising the good old days when it comes to reading books. It was extremely difficult to carry a lot of books at the same time. For example, during my school days, I could only carry two or three storybooks when we went to our village home for winter vacation. But now, due to Kindle, it is no longer a problem. I have also found it quite easier because as I am more exposed to the screen nowadays, reading from Kindle seems like a more convenient task than reading paper books. I think Kindle readership will only keep increasing in the future. It is not very costly and it should be considered as an investment."
The opposition of Kindle mostly comes from people having a traditional view that paper books are the only real books, but with the passage of time, this view, although already being quite confined to a small section of people, is gradually changing and more and more people are holding positive views regarding e-readership.
As a great deal of students nowadays have to read PDF textbooks that are not available in Bangladesh, the habit of reading books online is increasing and this, in turn, has resulted in the current popularity of Kindle.
Reading, like a lot of other hobbies, is constantly evolving to meet the demands of time. As this century is the century of the internet, e-reading seems to be the way of the future and Kindle certainly is playing its role as a huge catalyst.
