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I have a confession to make. It's very serious, potentially life threatening (ok, maybe only financially threatening), and very hard to admit to.
I am a secret ebook addict.
There, I said it. I buy ebooks. All the time. A furtive browse on amazon quickly slides into a iniquitous book binge. I get the shakes, sweaty palms, an overriding fear of being found out and then...that thrill of owning a new book. I hide it away in my (obsessively) categorised kindle, hoping that anyone who cares to have a peek will get lost in my many folders before discovering quite how many ebooks I own. And then I carry on with my day, forgetting after a while that I've bought new books. Until that dreaded email - 'thank you for ordering with amazon'. Duh, duh, duhhhhhhhhhh.
Now, aside from my penchant to overly dramatise everything, I can't be the only person who buys ebooks on a whim. Just because they're cheap, or you really want it but it's only out in hardback, or perhaps it's not a shelf-space worthy book, or maybe it's a book that you're a tad embarrassed to own in physical form. I've used all these justifications (excuses) at one time or another. My current go-to excuse is 'it's for holiday reading'. Yes, I'm already collecting ebooks for my holiday in August and have been since January. I think there are more 'holiday' ebooks on my kindle now than I could possibly read in a week. But then (ever sneaky) my brain will convince me that I need choice on this holiday. Why only take 10 ebooks when I could have a whole library of choice. Never mind that half of them will languish on those metaphorical shelves until I reach kindle capacity and realise that I've spent a small fortune on 'cheap' books that I'll 'get to eventually' but eventually never came.
So when I announce on twitter or smugly tell my Mum that I've not bought books in forever, then perhaps give me a nudge and remind me that ebooks count too, no matter how hard I try to convince myself that they don't.
In the spirit of candour, I'm going to list below the ebooks I have purchased from amazon in the last few weeks. Don't judge me too harshly.
The Undertaking by Audrey Magee (read)
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (read)
Night Film by Marisha Pessl
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories ed. Victoria Hislop
Perfect by Rachel Joyce (read)
The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer (read)
The Unseen by Katharine Webb
The Wind-up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth
Catastrophe by Max Hastings
The Silent Wife by A.S.A Harrison
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The End of Alice by A.M Homes
Paris Requiem by Lisa Appignanesi
The Silver Dark Sea by Susan Fletcher
Don't leave me alone in this pit of bookish iniquity - who else is a secret ebook buyer?
