A little history
I’ve been an avid reader all of my life, starting when my grandmother, a speculative fiction fan from way back first bought me a little selection of books on my 8th birthday.
My love affair with reading covers all genres and I learned to speed-read before I was 12 years old. There were so many books to read and I wanted to read them all.
Growing up, I had a bunk bed, with just the upper deck and the wall underneath was filled in with bookshelves. When I set out on my own, one of the criteria for my homes was enough wall-space to install bookshelves.
Moving entailed dozens of bankers boxes full of books, the vast majority being paperbacks, since they were sufficiently standardized in size that I could easily build bookshelves out of the standard industrial wall racks with the clips for the shelves. Using 8 foot 6 inch boards of laminated particle board was the cheapest and most efficient method and I ended up with rooms filled floor to ceiling with bookshelves. To the point in my mid-20’s, I stopped even trying to count them and simply measured my collection in board-feet since that was the useful metric required to determine the amount of space I needed.
I really wish that I had thought to take pictures of the various installations, but this was pre-digital photography.
After a nomadic phase in my 30’s I finally broke down and sold off the majority of my collection as it was simply taking up too much space. Now it’s down to a paltry dozen bankers’ boxes, sadly in storage since international moving costs are so bloody expensive.
Moving to digital
I have been a firm supporter of reading on electronic devices going back to the original Palm Pilot, Handspring, Treos, and now finally the modern troika of Kindle, iPhone and iPad.
We’ve finally arrived at a stage where the quality and availability of eBooks and the associated readers is so good that I hardly miss the paper aspect, and especially appreciated the fact that my collection is tucked away in the rest of my electronic data infrastructure, taking practically no space at all.
The fact that I have access to everything from anywhere that I have an Internet connection is a wonderful feeling. I tend to re-read a lot of books because otherwise it’s an inordinately expensive habit.
What’s missing
Despite all of the good things about moving to an eBook world there are still some things that I miss. One simple one is the fact that a book is also an advertisement. Watching people read on their Kindle or iPad, I have no idea of what they’re reading. Many of my purchases were initiated from seeing the cover of a book being read by someone on the bus or at the park.
The other thing that I miss is the visual stimulus of looking at a bookshelf filled with books. There’s a certain beauty in the pseudo random colorings of the spines transformed into familiar patterns on the wall. Of course all of my books were carefully ordered alphabetically by author, followed by series as applicable. Adding a new book to the shelf sometimes required pushing everything off to the right with a cascading move across shelves that generated new patterns, and also obliged me to look at all of the titles as I worked and perhaps be inspired to pull a forgotten book down and read it again.
In the electronic world, I’ve standardized on using Calibre for maintaining my collection and doing everything I can to ensure that I have an unlocked copy on both ePub and .mobi format so that I can read anything on any of my devices whenever the desire strikes.
But I miss the serendipity of browsing. The operating mode of electronic libraries and databases is predicated on search, which assumes that you know what you are looking for before you start. I’ll have to write a screen saver to show all of the covers in the Calibre library for the AppleTV in the living room to remind me of all of the books that are not top of mind.