When I attended a party thrown by Joel Spolsky at his apartment, I got to browse through his library. Joel’s library was somewhat bigger and better organized than mine, but with a significant overlap: on almost every shelf I encountered at least several books that I already had or had in my wishlist.
Keeping a large library is something that I feel a little guilty about. Living space is precious and books take up a lot of it. One of my livejournal friends told me that he does not keep more than a small bookshelf of books at home (although he reads more than I do). Once he’s done with a book he either sells it at Half Price Books or gives it to a friend or acquaintance.
So why do I keep all the books? Besides the obvious vanity: look how sophisticated and edjumacated I am, there are other, more subtle reasons. When I was little, my father had an even bigger library. It was a great: exploring hundreds of books right at home was a great joy. My bed was located right under a huge bookshelf – if I wanted some bedtime reading all I had to do was to stretch my hand.
Joel put it best that evening: he feels that if somebody would read all the books that he has read, that person would start thinking similarly. A library is a sort of a mind dump, a memex chain. It becomes a part of who you are. Giving my library up would be extremely difficult for me. Call it the collector’s instinct, a fetish – it does not matter. Some poor people just are attached to physical books.
One of the reasons I got a job at TV Guide was because at the time it purchased two most promising eBook companies, NuvoMedia and Softbook. It thought that the electronic revolution would finally happen and we’d be reading from small electronic tablets, like on Star Trek. I do love paper books, but the promise of instant gratification and the library in a chip that was promised to us so long ago was even more tempting.
Sadly, the two companies were deprived of resources and smothered. I still think that the tablet reader is in our near future, and the Sony eInk tablet is a step in the right direction, although I am so displeased with Sony for a number of reasons (about which I’ll rant some other time) that I refuse to buy any of their products. In any case, my former co-worker Martin Eberhard, the founder of NuvoMedia (maker of the more successful and practical RocketBook) is now building awesome electric cars. I really wish I had a chance to interact with him at TVG — I share his fascination with Tesla and world changing technologies.
Since the ebook revolution is not coming any time soon, I finally decided to do something about keeping my books organized and joined LibraryThing. LibraryThing is a great online tool that allows you to create a catalog of your books by either typing in an ISBN number or book title. The interface is super usable. To make cataloging even faster I dug out my good ‘ol CueCat that I “declawed” back in the day. Seeing how crappy it was, I broke down and bought a real usb laser barcode scanner off eBay. It works like a charm – there’s a rotating laser inside and everything. Indeed, you get what you pay for.
I simply scan the barcode (if there’s one) or type in the title, add a tag that contains a shelf number – and that’s it. Now if I need to find a book I can simply search for it and find out which shelf it’s on. I don’t really need a more exact location. So far I’ve entered about 250 books. This covers the kitchen, bathroom and a couple of shelves in the living room. Altogether I have 2 Ikea Billys in the living room, 2 in one bedroom and 3 in another. In my estimation there should be at least 2000 books in my library, although a friend of mine thinks that it’s more like 1000. We’ll see who’s right once I’ll finish the catalog. My friend estimated (conservatively) that I spent about $5 per book, so my books must have cost me $5-10K. I feel kind of like Carrie from Sex and the City who had about $40K worth of Blahniks in her closet.
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Yes, but while clothing is an *expense*, books are an *investment*.
Sigh. I have given up 1.5 Billys of books for our last move. It was quite difficult, and occasionally I still feel pangs of nostalgia for my selected best-of star trek novels. Now-a-days I read books on my palm or get them in the library.
BTW, what good reads have you had lately?
I am rereading a whole bunch of Pratchett (again); and next up is Ian Banks (we raided NYPL and Cornell (via Columbia) libraries and have a stack of them.)
My partner Sam has forced me to scale down my library. I went from 5 bookshelves to 1. I gave away most of my books by the simple expedient of leaving them outside on my stoop. People pick them up if they want them and I feel good knowing that someone is going to read them.
The only problem was when I put a whole box out and someone just grabbed the whole thing…
I keep planning on using bookmooch and bookcrossing to give away books, but my barrier to entry has always been the data entry. I don’t want more “things”: no room for even a laser scanner, but I’d love it if my cameraphone could process the barcode…
you’re lucky to have barcodes on (most of?) your books.
Sony Reader, despite all its shortcomings (the UI is horrible), is the closest thing to what I want an ideal book reading device to be. It’s nearly perfect for fiction (I am talking mostly about EInk technology). And it’s okay for most non-fiction. Large illustrations, color graphs, wide tables, etc. don’t look their best on the EInk screen. But my biggest grip is with people, not the Reader. I wish more authors who tend to write long articles had “plain” or “printable” view on their websites. Or at least included full articles in their RSS feeds! It would make extracting and formatting text for the Reader so much easier.
As for collecting books — it’s just a bunch of dead trees with dust on them. Get over it! :)
I recently acquired a brand new X41 tablet for $500 on ebay. It is the bomb. I still have my Rocket Ebook, but the X41 does it all better. Maybe I am misguided, but i think the tablet PC thing has a real future.
Wow … I love Library Thing. Thanks for the mention, no idea how I missed that site. Bought a lifetime account and have started entering books (in no particular order)!
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/laurelo
Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?