My Delicious Library collection just hit 1,000 books. That’s not so big, it’s only a fraction of the books I’ve read in my life. I only started cataloguing my books a few years ago.
What is alarming about that is that most of the books are in my house, and most are in physical form. I read a lot, and the majority of the time I’m reading something I own. The reason it’s worrying is that these books take up a lot of space, and cost a lot of money.
I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with ebooks. Of course they take up less space, and are more convenient when travelling. The problems with DRM and ownership mean that I tend to only use ebooks now for books from Project Gutenberg or the internet archive, and PDFs of scholarly papers.
And not even that second one, due to the lack of big enough readers. For a long time I owned and enjoyed a Kindle DX, with a screen big enough that a typical magazine page was legible without zooming in. Zooming in on a columnar page is horrific. It’s like watching a tennis match through a keyhole. But the Kindle DX broke, is no longer a thing, and has no competitors. I don’t enjoy reading on regular computer screens, so the option of using a multipurpose tablet is not a good one.
Ebooks also suffer from being out of sight and out of mind. I actually bought some bundle of UX/HCI/design books over a year ago, and have never read them. When I want to read, I look at my pile of unread books and my shelves. I don’t look in ~/Documents/ebooks.
I do listen to audiobooks when I commute, but only when I commute. It’d be nice to have some kind of multimodal reader, across a “printed” and “spoken” format. The Kindle text-to-speech was not that, when I tried it. Jeremy Northam does a much better job of reading out The Road to Wigan Pier than an automated speech synthesiser does.
The technique I’m trying at the moment involves heavy use of the library. I’m a member of both the local municipal library and a big university library. I subscribe to a literary review magazine, the London Review of Books. When an article in there intrigues me, I add the book to the reading list in the library app. When I get to it, I request the book.
That’s not necessarily earth-shattering news. Both public and subscription libraries have existed for centuries. What’s interesting is that for this dedicated reader and technology professional, the digital revolution has yet to usurp the library and its collection of bound books.
