Monday, January 12, 2015

My personal library is smaller and bigger than ever

I am shifting my viewpoint on my ebook collection. I am seeing it less and less as books I have bought and are way behind on reading. This viewpoint just leads to ulcers. 
Instead I'm starting to see it as a "personal library". 
A library in the sense that most of the books in there, I have not read yet. 
And Personal in the sense that I have selected all the books, so each has a high likelihood of being of interest to me. 

What makes this possible is first and foremost that the books take up zero space. A Kindle or iPad with 1004 books is exactly as big and heavy (or small and light) as the same device with only 4 books. 
And secondarily, most books I get are way more affordable than their dead-tree counterparts. And of course there's over a million classics and others to get for free.  So now I'm getting a hundred books for a price I'd pay for maybe twenty or thirty books in the past. And I don't have to keep buying new cherry wood bookshelves and keep getting rid of books for space reasons.

It used to be that only the rich had a personal library. Now its available to any middle-class person.