The experience of reading books on an iPad is disconcertingly beautiful. It has rapidly become the favourite use of this dazzling gadget in our house. We are entering a new age of the book, and it may turn out to be a bright one.
Every book on the iBooks reader becomes, literally, illuminated. In the history of the book, illumination refers to the decoration of hand-copied manuscripts by medieval monks. No angels or devils appear, no gothic letters sprout curls of foliage, when you open an iBook: the illumination rather consists of a backlit white screen on which type looks singularly seductive. You want to turn the page and see more – so you do just that, physically flicking over a virtual sheet of paper with the tactile technology that makes the iPad so easy to use. Fans of the rival digital book reader, Amazon's Kindle, which is controlled with buttons, deny that Apple's touch-sensitive science makes a difference.
But for me it makes all the difference in the world. Reading a book in this way feels right.
I am naturally suspicious of the coming of the digital book. It sounds like the apocalypse: the final irony, to be a professional writer in the last days of publishing ... but the thrill of reading books – and buying books, which is the critical thing – on this gadget changes the look and feel of the age. The future suddenly seems more literate. It's not just that you can read a book on this machine: it is that you want to. Old, innocent, childish memories of reading are awakened by its glowing screen for it has one very obvious advantage: you can read in the dark. That's what I've been doing, late at night, and the first books I bought for the iPad were therefore spooky Victorian tales. The newest technology seems in this case to revive old habits of reading, old – even cosy – pleasures of the book. Gothic tales late at night, to be read on a screen that glows reassuringly in the dark, even as the words unleash spectres from the corners of the room.
Perhaps reading in the dark is an image of where it's at. Who knows where all this leads? One thing is sure, to read is to enter worlds of the unknown. And nothing makes you so aware of that as the uncanny sensation of reading The Monkey's Paw on the iPad, one magic letting in the other.
