wherein Liz deals with books

[edenfalling]

This afternoon, in a fit of productivity, I sorted through one of the printer-paper boxes full of random stuff that I keep under my coffee table, and managed to get all the contents either recycled, thrown out, or filed somewhere at least vaguely more useful.

Then I took the box and weeded my bookshelves.

I tend not to do that more than once or twice a year, because it's a pain in the neck, but I had several new books waiting to be shelved and a bunch of others to which my sentimental attachment had finally worn thin enough for me to ditch them. All told, I ended the process with one whole shelf less of books, and a full box ready to leave the apartment.

I think I'll make a list of the books and see if the used book store downtown is interested in any of them. The rest will wind up at the Friends of the Library book sale.

...

Sometimes I wish I'd been born fifteen or twenty years later, so that when I started acquiring books in a big way, I would have bought e-books. I really don't want to re-purchase books that I already own, but the physical storage space has been an annoyance for a long time. *sigh*

Comments

[redwolf]

The physical storage space is my problem too.

I never really thought much about e-books until a friend mentioned reading them on his phone, which sounded insane. He sent some my way and I found out it's a surprisingly good platform.

My problem now is that I refuse to buy e-books broken by DRM. Fortunately, Tor has dumped DRM and Humble Bundle offer DRM free pay-what-you-want e-books on a regular basis. There's also the library, although the system is more than a little mangled by limiting you to only your own library and introducing the insanity of false scarcity. Alas, I've only found one series of interesting books via the library option, the bulk are lame YA dreck.

[edenfalling]

Space for bookcases is one of the chief reasons I am in an apartment larger than I really need -- it was either a place with, essentially, an extra room and a half, or a place where I could only keep one bookcase. The books won.

...

I'm not entirely sure I'd make the same choice a second time.

[transposable_element]

I have a copy of A Suitable Boy that I've been meaning to read for ages, but the book is 1400+ pages long so I thought I'd buy an eBook to save me having to cart it around -- except apparently there is no ebook! How is this possible? This book is one of the longest single-volume novels ever published! It's exactly the kind of book that should be digitized! I am appalled. Also affronted.

[edenfalling]

Digitization is such a haphazard process right now. *sigh* But yes, doorstoppers are prime candidates for digitization, and I can't think why that one hasn't been.

[transposable_element]

Hmm. I can't seem to find any of Vikram Seth's books in ebook form. Weird.

In general I prefer reading books in hard copy, but ebooks are a lot more convenient.

[marmota_b]

There's been a point in my life when some of my books (quite a lot of them) sat on the top of a bunk bed, on the bottom level of which I slept, occasionally fearing that I would die a horrible death by books.
I have Kindle on my laptop, but I'm finding out I'm still too attached to physical books. And I keep dragging more in. Massive admiration to you for the strength to actually clean them out.

[edenfalling]

I basically go through and ask myself, A) do I ever reread this, B) how easily can I find a copy via the library or a used book store if necessary, and C) do I have any sentimental attachment to it? (Sometimes I also ask myself if I'd ever volunteer to write Yuletide fanfiction for a text.) And then I get rid of the ones that are essentially acting as heavy dust-collectors.

If not for question C, I suspect I'd have gotten rid of an entire bookcase worth of volumes, but emotions are funny things. *wry*

[marmota_b]

C) and B) are the greatest offenders for me, I think. I have a number of very old books that I have not even read yet, but have a sort of emotional attachment to their age and relative rarity, thinking of them as documents of the past... I have a writers' Who's Who from, I think, 1949 I chanced upon in a Prague bookshop for the ridiculous price of 5 CZK; it serves as pretty much nothing else but a weight and a curious proof that in 1949 Lewis was in a writers' Who's Who and Tolkien wasn't.
And then there's all those childhood books that I haven't touched in years.