How to Make My Bookshelf Sublimate
A Book Lover’s Plea
Hardcovers. Paperbacks. Magazines. With the notable exception of the kitchen, you can stretch out an arm and chances are you’ll reach one of those, wherever you are in my house.
I had the good fortune of growing up in a family where books were revered and abundant. Perhaps not always the titles I wanted (the centerpiece, La Nuovissima Enciclopedia,was in fact various decades old), but books nonetheless. As a cash-strapped student, I was used to go on pilgrimage to the Feltrinelli bookstore multiple times a week. I handled the same copy of Minsky’s “The Society of Mind” through all my college years, to the point that they had it wrapped in cellophane to keep it together; and what satisfaction it was, when I could finally afford to buy that exact copy! It traveled with me from Italy all the way to Redmond, where I moved 8 years ago, and sits proudly in my Ikea’s Black Billy depicted above.
Much to my wife’s chagrin, my weekly visits to Borders became my way of having an island of normality among all the crazy changes that come when you move to another country and get a new job; visits which filled our Billy at an increasing rate, a crescendo that ended in a few grands’ worth gorge at the fire sale when, sadly, their shop in Town Center went under. Since then, I did the only sensible thing to do: I got a membership with Barnes & Noble, although that’s now a bi-monthly matter. My backlog is enormous, especially when compounded with the numerous magazine subscriptions I got via frequent flyer programs.
Please don’t think that I am completely inept from the economic standpoint: I am fully aware of the fact that eBooks are significantly cheaper than their dead tree counterparts. In fact, even the dead tree books themselves are simply cheaper when bought online: I am a very credit card-happy Prime customer and I know that even during the fire sale Borders didn't even get close to most of the prices I could have gotten on Amazon. But it doesn't matter to me, or at least, it didn't matter until recently.
I love walking the aisles of a bookshop, seeing all those colorful spines reminding me of things I've already read and their relationship with the topic of that shelf. I like pulling out new books, leafing through them, and if I feel that I’d like more time with them, know that I can carry them with me to the checkout and bring them home, instead of sighing “one day…” and putting them back as I had to do for so many years.
Once home, I just love them as objects: I love the narrow purposiveness of the paper book, as it delivers me from the opportunity costs of reading that specific title on a device that can display many more (or even do other stuff); the fact that the text is just passive text, there are no blue underlined characters which – I know it, even if that takes place fully in the unconscious — require an ever so little computation for deciding whether I should click it; its inherently serial structure, although I can use my finders as bookmarks to keep other three passages on other pages handy if I want to quickly compare with the current one; and so on.
My ridiculously large backlog, however, is making me consider this eBook thing more seriously.
In the last few years I've been taking quite a number of international flights, which are just about the ideal reading settings for me. Every time I am done with the general packing, I go downstairs and start the tournament that will determine which books should come with me. And you know what? After few years of doing this, and given that I more and more often bring more than one laptop, I find that I select paperbacks and smaller tomes for their smaller footprint rather than going after what I’d really like to read. The fact that here in USA titles stay hardcover so much longer than in EU doesn't help, given that I tend to buy a book shortly after it comes out; that pushes the selection toward older titles.
Last winter I bought, after a few month’s wait, a novel from one of my favorite authors (the recently passed Iain M. Banks), the Hydrogen Sonata. It is a thick tome, with a nice hardcover. I estimate it weights a good couple of pounds. Facing a long flight, I desperately wanted to bring it over. However its size was simply incompatible with my other packing requirements. That turned out to be an inflection point. Those contrasting requirement won over my loss aversion and I did the unthinkable: I re-bought in digital format a title I already owned on paper. For that specific circumstance, it was a good decision. I enjoyed it immensely, its length and tone were just perfect for that trip. I don’t regret spending those dollars at all.
Did that fully convert me to digital books, however? It did not. Say that I am victim of the sunken costs bias, I don’t care, but I am just too invested at this point. I can certainly buy new titles in both paper and digital format, or even digital-only, but what about the backlog? We are talking about a few hundred books here, which I paid in full (with few exceptions from my rare visits to Half Price Books and the freebies I get as author). I don’t want to re-buy them all at full price, nor do I believe that it would be ethical to expect me to.
I am finally getting to the reason for which I wrote this lengthy post.
Wouldn't it be great if there were some kind of promotional program, for which the ownership of a physical copy of a book entitled you to acquire its digital version at a heavily discounted price?
The music industry saw something similar relatively recently. Customers already owning MP3s acquired through some other service could have them “recognized” for a nominal price and, from that moment on, use them just as if they had bought them from the target service in the first place. Wouldn't it be great if we could do the same for books? Send somebody over to my house to certify which books I own; stamp them with an RFD to make sure they are not double-counted if you must, I don’t care; then, for each of them offer me the chance to buy the corresponding e-copy for a couple of bucks. I understand that, being MP3s digital and all, they’re much easier to handle at scale than physical objects like book copies, hopelessly relegated to Mediocristan-scale operations. On the other hand I myself don’t have any data about how many people like me are out there, hence as far I know the size of the opportunity might make the above sound not so far-fetched after all.
So dear Amazon, Barnes & Noble or any other big shop selling digital books: if you’ll ever launch something like the above, please consider my household for the Beta program!
And for you, fellow book lovers caught with one foot in the world of wood pulp and the other in the world of touch screens and high contrast displays. If you are out there and you’d like something like the above, make your voice be heard! I doubt we’d ever reach enough momentum to make something like that happen, I know I've been silly to delay my move to eBooks until I hoarded such a high pile and I expect most people to act more wisely, but what do I know! Maybe you too caressed for many years a book you could not buy, and now occasionally find comfort and refuge between those walls of multicolored spines…
