Owning lots of paper books is just lovely, UNTIL IT’S TIME TO MOVE! Speaking as someone who owns a couple thousand paper volumes, and who has just moved from a very large house with lots of built-in bookcases to a much smaller one with no built-ins (until we finish the basement), I have, for the first time in my life, begun to rethink my attachment to paper books.
Yes, they look nice on the shelves. Yes, they are impressive to visitors. Yes, they feel nice and smell nice (mostly). And yes, they serve as a kind of portrait of you and your interests throughout your life. (For me, this is the real reason I am so reluctant to get rid of them.)
But let’s face it: if you own, say, 2,000 volumes, how often do you actually go back to reread or even briefly refer to any one book? How many have you read once, put on the shelf, and never touched again? How many have you started and never finished? How many have you bought and never even read?
On this last move we used movers, so I didn’t personally carry those 70 fifty-pound boxes of books from the house to the van or from the van into the new house (in the July heat). But I packed them all myself, and I’ll be moving them from the garage and unpacking them when we eventually get the shelf space. And it’s not as easy for me at 63 as it was when I was 53, or 43, or 23.
If you’re lucky enough, as we were, to have space for your books, and your if life is stable enough that you aren’t likely to have to move (ours wasn’t), there may be little downside to owning a big private library. But my wife and I are less than a decade from retiring, and at that time will probably move to an even smaller house or condo. So the cons of owning lots of books are beginning to outweigh the pros, for me.
I propose that we lobby congress to enact a law that gives purchasers of paper books the right to a free digital copy, as is the case now with music and videos. It’s criminal that publishers can charge as much for a digital version of a book as for the hard copy. Either make the digital copy very cheap, or make it a package deal: full price gets both editions. And it should be retroactive: I should be able to get a free digital copy of every book I already own. Then I could happily free myself of the burden of tons of physical books.