Banning Kindles is no way of celebrating books

We all love secondhand bookshops, don't we – that heady pleasure of browsing through shelves, or rummaging through boxes to find vintage paperbacks and forgotten gems . I'm a particular fan of that secondhand bookshop heaven Hay-on-Wye , but I'm puzzled by the Hay bookseller Derek Addyman, who seems to have started a bizarre campaign to drive Kindles out of town. "Booksellers here definitely want them banned," he told the Daily Mail , describing people "walking around with them" – or, as you might say, reading – as "robots in another world". According to Addyman, Kindles are "our enemy", they're "just a phase ... [which] won't last". "Kindles have no place at this festival which is supposed to be a celebration of the written word," he added, "and books." Maybe we should take Addyman's remarks with the customary pinch of salt – after all, Hay booksellers are famously good at drumming up publicity – but surely Kindles are, well, all about reading books. Now some may be fearful of Amazon , and perhaps with good reason , but attacking people who read ebooks, or suggesting that ebooks aren't really books at all, is just plain silly. E-readers, which have been getting progressively better and cheaper, are not a phase. They are not the enemy of books, and neither are those of us who use them. The pleasures of stumbling upon that book you never knew you wanted on a dusty shelf – a pleasure that no e-reader can ever replace – have always depended on the wisdom of booksellers, especially in the kind of ramshackle secondhand bookshop that I love. I wonder what's become of that wisdom in Hay?