Nope, Kindle isn’t my friend. Paper books for me.
I helped a friend that owns an estate sale company. The estate she was liquidating had over 15,000 books. She hired me and another person to go through the books and see if any had any real value. 90% were hard cover books with a mix of fiction, non-fiction and educational books. Despite spending over 100 hours each, we only were able to check out maybe 5,000 of the books. We found a couple first editions but they had no real value. During the 3 day estate sale, all the books were free, maybe 1000 or so were taken. The books that were left over were taken by a small company that recycled the pages into new paper and used the covers to make new notebooks. I spent a very long weekend at her business slicing all the bindings off the books with a bandsaw. The pages were sorted by type, vellum or uncoated paper could easily be made into new paper, the shiny paper was recycled. I was gifted 10 personalized notebooks that I have used over the years to document my various travels. All 10 are on the bookshelf behind me as I type this.
For most of us book lovers, books are more than just a way of efficiently acquiring factual information.
I recall a New Yorker cartoon from many years back.
A man was in a book shop speaking to the clerk:
“I’ll take 3 feet of green books.”
mmm
That’s pretty bonkers. I mean, do you even ask them if they read? Most of our physical books are in the bedroom where acquaintances don’t see them and where my kid is less likely to get into them without supervision, and the vast majority of my books are now on Kindle. But I read every day. Just because you can’t see books in someone’s living room doesn’t mean they aren’t readers.
You can still buy feet of books, and they can be color sorted for you. Decorators do this for people who feel that a background of books makes for a “better” living space. Usually these aren’t walls of books, but a few shelves used like any other decorative object.
I have about 15,000 books and magazines. I’m spending all my time thinking about how I can get rid of them. Most of them are worthless by today’s standards, but even the ones that aren’t will need the proper buyer.
I hate to do it. I love books. If you don’t love books the way a booklover loves books, you can’t understand.
The Kindle has drastically slowed my library’s growth but something I really like, I get the hardcopy. Truth is, I still don’t trust digital media to remain available, so I’ll still buy books and movies occasionally.
I was watching an interview with someone on MSNBC.
I couldn’t help but notice that the books on the shelves behind her were all organized by the color of the bindings. The books were of different shapes and sizes, so it’s not as if these were different series of books.
This was someone who obviously ca5red more about the way they appeared on the shelves that about content, or even size.
I’ll bet none of them had been read.
I’ve given myself 3 or 4 cracks at the Kindle over the years, but I keep going back to paper.
Part of the reading process is, to me, the feel of the paper, the weight of the book, the act of turning the page, the awareness of the bookmark, and yes, the way it looks on the shelf.
I get the appeal and I see the advantages, but an e-reader will never be a book.
mmm
I think most of us would agree.
We can read online stuff to get information, and it’s easier to search.
But reading for pleasure… you want a real book. No subsitute for turning the pages.
I’ll sometimes arrange a case by color, or numbers in the title, or grammatical structure of the title, or content of the title, just to see if anyone notices. I just took down a multi-topic shelf where every book had “rat” in the title.
I felt the same way even after I got my first Kindle device 13 years ago. I stopped using it after only a year or two, in favor of an Android tablet that is now my near constant companion for web browsing, e-mail, and reading books. Yes, it’s not the same as reading a paper book, but just like switching from regular to diet soda, after a while I realized that different isn’t the same as worse: it’s just a matter of what you get used to.
And there are so many advantages to e-books. Searching, inside and outside the book, obviously. A few months ago I read a paper book for the first time in a long time, and had to resist the urge to put my finger on an unfamiliar word to look up its definition. I never wrote in my paper books, but putting notes in ebooks is no big deal. It doesn’t violate the purity of the book the way writing in a paper edition does.
The there’s space and weight. If you live in a house large enough for all your books, and never have to move, owning lots of books is reasonable. But try moving three or four times into ever smaller spaces with 2,200 books. It gives you a different perspective on the importance of reading from a real paper book.
I have long felt the same way, but the constraints of the small space we now live in means that all my physical media, CDs and DVDs, are in storage.
The library was contacted by a woman who was going to have a Harry Potter-themed wedding, and she wanted old books to use as decoration, and then guests could take home any they wanted, as party favors I guess. We found some that weren’t valuable, and sold them to her for 50 cents each.
And there’s always this.
Organization, folks, organization.
Therein lies the problem. I tried selling my Alaskana on ebay with limited success. Even the first editions and scarce books were a hard sell and everyone wants to haggle you down with a “best offer”. I ended up donating the vast majority of them to a lending library in a town in Alaska, paying for the shipping myself just to get rid of them. My wife is emotionally attached to a lot of hers. She still has her basic economics texts from college for some reason. I don’t mean the ones from grad school; I’m talking Econ 101.
I read most books on Kindle because I can adjust the print size to something that doesn’t give me a headache.
A few years ago I decided that there were the following stages in the life of a reader:
You’re born.
There’s an ever so brief period before you learn to read.
You quickly read as many books as you can that your family already has in your house as well as your textbooks…
You borrow books from the school and public libraries and read them, along with some that other people give you as gifts.
You buy books yourself as soon as you have your own income.
You begin filling your home with the books you’ve bought.
You realize that your home has become so stuffed with books that you have no remaining space for them.
You donate slowly more and more to charities as well as giving them as presents until you have enough space to live in.
You die.
I knew someone who arranged their books by publisher and number - this was back before ISBN when paperback publishers had more or less sequential numbering.
I did organize my books that way once, but it was too hard to find anything and I went back to arranging by author names.
He definitely read his books, btw. And it was interesting to see the development of artwork for the covers over time.
Don’t worry. I had probably over 3,000 books when we put our house in NJ on the market, and it sold in under a day.
Now I have over 6500 sf books and my wife has easily 1,000.
Well, can’t have that. 
I organize non-fiction by topic, fiction by author. From there, depends on subtopics, space limits on the designated shelf, etc. I can usually find what I’m looking for fairly quickly, but DH has trouble (probably 95%+ of our books are primarily mine).