A couple of things I like about the Kindle. If lighted, you can read anywhere. I mostly read in bed. My wife may be having a hard time sleeping and may open her kindle at 3am. She doesn’t need any other light so I’m not disturbed.
She didn’t think she would like the Kindle, but she’s totally hooked. It’s also nice that when on vacation and you finish a book, it’s a simple mater to get a new one without leaving your lounge chair and margarita.
Also I have my phone and my kindle ‘tethered’ they are synced. So where ever I go, I have all the books I’ve read, plus the current one at the place I stopped reading. This is great for appointments and such when you have to wait for a bit.
There are clearly two different feelings about hard paper and digital. What ever floats your boat says I.
I do most of my reading at night before bed and with the dark mode and warm lighting I pretty much guarantee blue light won’t keep me awake. The light output is so low I’ve occasionally startled my husband by speaking when he thought I was asleep rather than reading. He can’t see the light at all.
Then when I go somewhere, being able to toss my entire library into my purse is nothing short of magical to me.
I’ve also found reading longer books is a snap. In fact I bought my first Kindle after an unpleasant time reading an unwieldy Stephen King book (Under the Dome.) It’s hard to take a tome like that into the bathtub. I don’t tend to notice or think about the length of a book as much when it’s on Kindle. Which makes me more likely to pick up some of the heftier classics, like Bleak House and currently The Count of Monte Cristo.
There’s so much I love about Kindle, I really can’t imagine ever going back. I’ve occasionally been forced through circumstance to read physical copies of books, as I recently did with 100 Ray Bradbury short stories, and the physical book reading experience was nothing special. That was another big book I couldn’t take with me anywhere.
As I mentioned, I use my Android tablet, not an actual Kindle, and I set it for white type on black background. I find that much easier to read, especially at night.
I’ve got tons of paperbacks from way back, a lot of which are probably nearly unreadable now (tiny type, browning pages), but they fill two barrister’s bookcases in the living room and are there if I want to reread one without having to go buy a new copy or order from the library. I have both hardcovers and paperbacks in the dozen-shelf hallway bookcase with adjustable shelves I had made by a local woodworker.
I have a lot of hardcovers, mostly bought as second-hand ex-library books from Better World Books, and they live on shelves in my third-floor reading room, along with certain series in hardcover and paperback (all my Terry Pratchett and Steven Brust, for example).
I have a Kindle Paperwhite, three Fire tablets of various vintages, and a no-longer connected ancient Kindle that still has lots of books on it, on all three floors. I also have the Kindle app on my smartphone. The Kindles are synced. I’ve found there are some books I can only get in digital form.
Then there’s the library, when I’m trying to cut back on book-buying. If it’s not in their collection there’s the Merrimack Valley consortium; if it’s not there I can link into the Commonwealth Catalogue and browse pretty much all the libraries in the state.
All formats have their good points and less-good aspects. Hardcover is easier for me to read than paperbacks at this point, though. Hardcovers are especially useful with illustrations, or a graphic novel like Ursula Vernon’s “Digger”. I like being surrounded by books; they’re an important part of my life history and it gives me pleasure to see them.
Heaven help the folks who’ll have to clean out my condo when I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, though.
I probably only have a couple of hundred books right now, sorted kinda idiosyncratically on our shelves (in broad and not always consistent categories: history, politics, Sherlock Holmes, sf, humor, etc). We moved quite a bit back in the day and got tired of lugging lots o’ boxes stuffed with books each time. Since then I’ve tried to be careful in only acquiring new books that I know I’ll want to keep, or that I’ve found I can’t get from our local library. I’m otherwise pretty ruthless in donating books to the library if I’m sure I won’t need 'em again.
40 or so years ago, I was visiting my sister in another city. She had a small apartment, but her husband’s sister lived nearby and was out of town, and she’d said I could crash there.
I found myself in this strange apartment with nothing to read. Yes, poor planning. So I went searching. Without looking for hidden rooms/cupboards, the ONLY reading matter I found in the entire place was a Calvin & Hobbes (or maybe The Far Side) book.
And these people were both lawyers! You’d at least think there would be a law book or two, not that those would make good bedtime reading. Nope, not a one.
I’m still gobsmacked.
The only part of “Too many books” I can agree with is “…of fiction that you’ll read once–that’s what the Kindle is for”!
That’s where we’re at - best guess at the number of books in the house would be in the range of 5- to 6,000 and so talk of a ‘cull’ is a regular occurrence.
As graphic novels aka comic books have already been mentioned I will only tell about when we moved house from Brussels to Berlin at the beginning of the pandemic, where one of the strong guys who put everything in boxes and carried them downstaris and upstairs spoke to me in a hushed voice, as in inviting me to join in his conspiracy: “Yeah, you have a lot of books, but be honest: you did not read them, did you? They are just to show off!”
I admitted that some I had not read, which seems to have made him happy.
I once found myself in a ranch in Mexico as a volunteer. I was staying with this nice farming family. There were only two books in the house, both in Spanish. One was Nicholas Sparks (ugh) and the other one was a book about how you should forgive your husband for being unfaithful. Awkward.
I opted for Nicholas Sparks, which you could tell was bad even reading it in a second language. I remember skimming to the inevitable Big Misunderstanding part because the rest of it was so bloody boring.
Whether hard copy or electronic, I need books in my life. My favorite genre is sci-fi, but I read pretty broadly. They say as a writer you should read often outside your genre. Outside of my writers group, which reads as much as I do, I have some friends that don’t read much, but they are intelligent, and I can still talk to them about the things I’m reading. They usually are collecting information in other ways. My Aunt can’t read well due to a learning disability but she ingests so much news, she’s usually much more up to speed than me on those subjects. What I know about current events these days is mostly what I learn on The Straight Dope.
Then there’s my husband, who reads almost exclusively graphic novels and the occasional clinical psych book (he’s reading heavily about autism now because after our son’s diagnosis he realized he was missing it in clients.) Now I’ve read my fair share of comics, and the great masterpieces like Watchmen, From Hell and Maus. But I can’t help but feel he’s missing out a bit by not reading anything else. That’s most of what’s left of our physical books - the stuff that doesn’t play well on Kindle or a tablet.
I love reading and I love books but I don’t have room in my house for bookshelves. All of the books that I’ve kept are in boxes in the basement. Most books I read now are on my Kindle. I no longer feel torn about what to do with a book after I read it. When I was reading paper books I always felt attached to it even though I don’t ever read books more than once. I have been slowly getting rid of the basement books. I sold all of my Stephen King books which I thought was going to be hard but once they were gone I was ok with it. The books that I can’t part with are the Marguerite Henry books - Misty of Chincoteague, Stormy, Sea Star, the list goes on. They were such a huge part of my childhood. Back then I read books more than once, especially those. Another one was The Horsemasters. I read that paperback probably 10 times. Plus many other books from that time in my life. I will keep those until I die.
My late husband was very OCD and bought thousands of books. Joe Bob wrote a great novel? Buy every single book by Joe Bob! Thousands and thousands of books, upstairs, downstairs, and in the basement. He also bought very expensive leatherbound books from some online place, he said they should be sold on eBay someday and make a fortune…A lot of the books were crap, big coffee table books about cats, gemstones, birds, horses! 101 Exotic Ice Creams To Make (published in the UK)…Encyclopedias, two or three sets. When I cleaned out the house in preparation for selling, I tore covers off dozens and dozens, recycling the paper. I called a bookstore owner to come and look, and he said there wasn’t much of value. Stephen King doorstops were found in every other house throughout the land!..all those costly leatherbound books were worthless since my husband had written his name large in every one - AND they were all reprints of tales of big game hunting from the 1800’s. Who was going to buy heavy tomes about murdering animals in Africa? Who, indeed…I did find a collector of such things and sold him several for maybe $10 each, what a pain to pack and mail. $$$ … I did give away dozens of hardcover childrens books (the complete Dr. Seuss, Cyndy Szekeres, some exquisite books of fairy tales) to some grateful grandmas and teachers… I listed 'come and get ‘em’ on the Free FB page (I put a bin of cookbooks, at least 200, out on the front step and they were gone before noon!). This was during covid and most libraries were not taking donations (and those that did were getting very picky).
I currently read most fiction books on my phone. It’s convenient, because I can carry a large selection of books wherever I go, and I can read in the dark.
I’m not parting with my paper-book library any time soon, however. It holds quite a bit of fiction that is not available in digital form (in fact, I personally digitized one particularly favorite old book for myself and my father, because our physical copies were deteriorating). I also have a number of obscure reference books that are easier to use in physical form, graphic novels and comics that would be intolerable to read on a phone, and many RPG manuals that are both more convenient in paper form and of sentimental value.
One of the times I moved one of the movers had noticed that most of the boxes were labeled “Books” and asked me if I’d actually read all of them. He didn’t seem surprised when I said I had, or make any condescending/insulting remark, but I could tell he had trouble grasping the idea that someone would read that much.
I’ve found the same. I actually lie and say I haven’t gotten to all of them, as people seem to find it reassuring; my own family growing up always seemed to find reading for pleasure a bit suspect behavior. Because of that, a throwaway line in James Blish’s “Jack of Eagles” always stuck with me. The MC develops telepathy and while being toted off by the police overhears a neighbor thinking “I knew that guy was trouble - always reading.”
Oh, I did not lie: some of the books were my wife’s, and I have not read them. We don’t have identical tastes. And some of my books I have not read yet.
Of course I asked him how many books he had. He said about ten. I did not say it out loud, but I thought that if I only had ten books, I would know them by heart by now. I did not ask which books he had. I did not want to embarras him: imagine he did not know the titles. Or even the colour of the cover.
I know a woman who does this… and worse yet, she’ll go to a bookseller and get all excited about finding an old edition of something like Barnaby Rudge. The antique, deckle-edged proprietor will get excited about her find…
… and have no idea that she has no intention of actually, y’know, reading it.