People of the Library

I am starting to be concerned about the number of books I am buying.

Not, let me assure anyone, for financial reasons - while none of my hobbies are cheap, we are a DINK household, and I can easily decide to buy less yarn and more books (or fewer books and more beads, or  any one of a number of other swaps) in a given month.  It's more a matter of space.  Our apartment is really the bottom half of an eighty-year-old house, and while it's quite generous for what we're paying, space is still somewhat limited.  In particular, I'm about to start having to stack the bookshelves in my study double-deep, as I don't have the space to buy another bookshelf.

Someone out there is suggesting that I thin the stacks and haul the books I don't need to the local used bookstore.  It's true that there are several books on the shelves, mostly dating from my just-post-college dalliance with dualistic Dianic Wicca by way of feminist religion, that I probably will neither read again  nor use as reference, and I could stand to get rid of them - but Mary Daly and Carol Christ, though I never really agreed with the first and often disagree with the monist tendencies of the latter, are both huge influences in my sorting-out period, when I set Yahveh down and began deciding what my theology actually looked like.  I'm not sure I want to part with those.  I do have a stack of books that need to be donated, but most of them are the leftovers from several donations I got from other people who were moving, simplifying, or cleaning out after a death in the family, and most of them have to do with either cooking or kinky sex rather than religion.   (In both cases, it's not that I don't like the books as that the specific flavors aren't quite to my taste.  I am having much better luck finding cookbooks that fit my rather particular palate than kink books.  But I digress.)

No, the big reason for the sudden explosion of text is that I've been digging into what we know historically about the ancient Near East and its religions, including a few forays into the Hellenized and Roman periods, and quite a few of the books I want on the topic (a) aren't available as ebooks, and (b) are in fact out of print.  So in many cases, it's a simple matter of having to grab them now or waiting until later, when they might not be available at all and will very probably be more expensive if they are.  That many of these were either explicitly textbooks or apparently assigned reading in some college courses means that there's the weird predatory business of used textbooks rattling around as well.

I wish publishers would quit writhing around about the business models for ebooks - no, it's not fair that Amazon and Apple and Barnes & Noble get to jack you around like this, but if you'd gotten on the stick earlier, you'd be more in control of your own electronic publication and distribution, and you didn't, so take your spanking from the Invisible Hand of the Market and deal with it like big boys and girls.  There's really no reason for anything to ever go "out of print" in electronic form when "printing" is a matter of file transfer.  In fact, publishers and authors lose sales when things go out of print, and if there's no loss in paper, ink, transportation, & storage costs, there's no reason to ever lose that sale.  It's the cost of the physical object and its maintenance that's the weight on the publisher's shoulders, and on my bending bookshelves.

The paper-lovers are having a fit out there.  Well, I love the feel and heft and smell of a proper paper book, too - and reading a paper book during a power outage is certainly easier.  There is certainly much to worry about as far as proprietary file types and device obsolescence go, too - but I think those concerns are somewhat overblown.  Paper books have their own planned obsolescence, too; it's just longer.  I've had cheap paperbacks from the '60s and hardbacks from the '40s disintegrate in my hands. Sure, most printers use better paper now (which is one reason books are so dang expensive), but no book will last forever, and most of them won't outlive their owners by more than a generation.  I've had a housefire. The documents that were on my hard drive mostly (not all - there was some damage) survived.  The books that were in the room where the fire started did not.

Have you ever seen a burned book?  I have.  It burns from the outside in.  I have picked up what looked like bricks of charcoal, opened them, and seen perfectly readable text in the middle.  The information was all still there, just as it is in the closed book on the shelf - but the act of reading it crumbled the medium under my fingers.  If I had had cloud backups, if they'd been on the e-reader (which I didn't have yet) in my backpack (which was with me, and thus not in the room that burned), if the information had lived in more than one place, I'd've still had those books.  I've never personally lost a book to water, but I've seen seen piles of mildewed paperbacks sitting on street corners for pickup after Ike, after every flood.  Digital isn't an ideal solution, but paper isn't as permanent as you think.

I'd love to relieve my groaning shelves and fill some digital library, backed up on device and server and thumb drive, such that every new purchase only added a few hundred K to drives that can store millions, billions.  I don't want the shelves empty - I just wish the nature of the business wasn't such that having too many interests left them overcrowded.