LIBRARIES
I got a gentle nudge today from Philip McEldowney, who graduated from the same high school that I did, Woodstock School in the lower Himalayas in India. He is a retired librarian from the University of Virginia. As he puts it, “I’m surprised you do not use and advocate people first find books at their library, instead of automatically, unthinkingly buying a book at whatever the price at Amazon. I realize most of us are relatively wealthy or well off financially, but not everyone in your vast audience is. And where possible I’d encourage you to mention getting the books you write about or mention, first looking to see if they are in a library near you.”
He is referring to “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” which, actually, I have only read in a printed copy long ago, but didn’t take out of the library, and probably misunderstood at the time and Rhizome and Rhizome Too, which I wrote about yesterday that he couldn’t find in any library.
On the issues of owning books and getting them out of the library I can’t argue with Philip. Since I was a young man I’ve had an addiction to buying books. First I bought them because I wanted to keep every book that I read, I suppose to be able to reread it, which I never did. Then there was a time for years when I rarely read books, but that didn’t stop me from continuing to buy books, usually second hand. Finally, I ended up with twenty or thirty boxes of books piled on top of each other in storage. I can’t read or reread any of them, even if I wanted to, and have the terrible problem of every old person of what to do with all the stuff I’ve collected in my life, including books. So these stored books are a kind of curse. I would gladly give all of them to Philip if he lived close by. If Philip is accusing me of being irrational, he is absolutely right.
For years my wife and I would go to the Asheville Pack Library downtown and take out books which she would read and I wouldn’t and eventually had to pay fines on. More irrationality.
But in the last ten years I began to read again about the time Amazon and Kindle came along. I shifted from buying printed books because I could finally store the books I have on line without their taking any space on a shelf. So now I only buy ebooks on line. But that doesn’t excuse me from going to the library and signing books out at no cost and reading them and returning them on time. So I am still being irrational.
I do have perhaps 1000 photography books of photographs by photographers whose work I like to look at, almost all bought cheaply second hand. I really like looking at photographs in books and I do look at them from time to time, but I am trying to wean myself off of buying even books of photography. Paintings I look at on line on my Meural Screen rather than in books or even museums. But I am even ready to give all my photography books away to some institution= that would make use of them and let people read them for free, I am ready to give them all to a public library and let someone else enjoy them, just what Philip is suggesting.
I only have four justifications for buying ebooks rather than going to the library.
1. Impatience. When the New York Times reviews a new book that I really want to read it doesn’t arrive in the library, processed and on the shelf, for weeks or months. I want to read it right now. I don’t want to wait until I can buy it second hand, either, or until it comes out in paperback, although that seems to happen quite quickly these days.
2. Travel. I’ll be overseas for four of the next six months and won’t have libraries available and don’t want to carry books with me. But this is actually a somewhat weak argument since I don’t read that many books while traveling. I can take a thousand ebooks along and will only read, at the most, ten of them.
3. Cost. Daily I get offers on BookBub.com. I don’t know why, but many ebooks are greatly discounted. The usual cost is $.99, 1.99 or 2.99. I can’t resist. You don’t have to be wealthy to buy $2 books. (The book I bought yesterday, Entangled Life, did, however, cost $9.99 on Kindle.)
4. Storage. I can live now in a very small space with all the music, books, films, magazines available on my iPad.
This is an argument for going digital rather than reading print books. But it is not a good argument for not going to the library because I don’t need to store library books, in fact libraries are the most efficient way for storing and sharing books, although libraries are going digital as well.
So when I look over what I have written I confess to a huge dose of irrationality. Philip is right, I’ve generally had no excuse for not getting books out of the library and now have caused myself a huge problem in getting rid of these books. I admit to appearing completely nuts.
But I do think that there is now a shift from printed books to ebooks, a shift that will slowly make conventional libraries of printed books like printed newspapers and magazines and everything printed become less and less relevant. That will save paper and storage but I am not sure what it will do to our quality of life. Ironically, this is at a time when anyone can self publish, anyone can print up their own book. It should be the golden age of publishing. I have maybe 60 photo books that people can buy in print versions at blurb.com if you search for billybaba. No one buys them as far as I know. Many of my friends have self published books.
So there is rapid change happening in publishing and reading and I guess I, and Philip, are caught in that change.
Meanwhile I am publishing here in a very, very modest way. Philip refers to my “vast” audience, which daily I think, according to WordPress, is perhaps 6 to 10 people, and even they may just glance at a page or two. I am grateful to Philip for swelling my audience and even more for bringing me up short and making me think and giving me a subject for one more post.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 