By Bill Mosley
April 2024
I have been moving books out of my home office little by little, with the ultimate aim of getting rid of most of them. I’ve discarded a lot of books already, with the big push coming when my wife and I downsized from a house to a much smaller condominium. I’d estimate my collection totaled at least 400 volumes when I started, and by the time we moved it was down to a little over about 300. Since then I’ve donated one more boxful to Goodwill and have been slipping others by the ones or twos into the Little Free Library across the street – always giving, never taking. I still have a little over 200 but plan to cut that amount substantially.
Such is the changing nature of what printed books mean to me, and to a lot of people. E-books are here to stay, and are increasingly what people read when they read books – with some 30 percent of readers now preferring them to print. The advantages of e-books over printed volumes are legion: They take up no space, are infinitely portable, and when you are on the move you can easily carry your entire library with you. Some people use a special e-reader tablet such as a Kindle, whereas I have Kindle and Nook apps on my phone – so when I’m out and about all of my e-books are in my pocket, accessible to me at all times.
Books are only one type of what I would call – since as far as I can tell no one else has invented a collective term for it – “hard media” that are going the way of the dodo. Recorded music, recorded TV and movies, and computer software have largely transitioned from forms that one can hold in one’s hand to virtual content to be streamed or downloaded.
Floppy discs for installing computer software are most sincerely dead, but there are people who cling to their CDs, vinyl records, DVDs and especially, their printed books. (However, I see little love for those iconic VHS tapes, or for eight track, cassette and reel-to-reel tapes.)
Recorded home entertainment is barely over a century old, and the types and formats in which they are packaged have constantly changed. Seventy-eight rpm records, the first of the mass-market record formats, were becoming popular by the 1920s, and they gave way to 45 rpm singles and 33 1/3 rpm long-playing records after World War II. CDs came along in the 1980s, but people clung to their LPs, claiming superior sound quality, notwithstanding the pops, hisses and skips that they inevitably acquired over time.
Within my memory, one could watch TV shows only over the air and only at the times stations aired them. Also until then, movies could be seen only in theaters or when TV stations aired them. The advent of cable TV, which was pioneered in the 1940s but didn’t take off until the 1980s, multiplied choices for viewers. But what really broke open the floodgates of choice was the introduction of video-cassette recorders, which enabled people to both purchase pre-recorded movies and TV shows – and straight-to-video programs such as instructional or exercise videos – and record programs off the air to watch at their leisure while often fast-forwarding through commercials.
Today, all of that is headed to the dustbin. Music and video content are streamed over the internet while books are downloaded from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or, increasingly, public libraries. What was once available only on hard media has largely moved to the metaphorical cloud.
Nevertheless, many people cling to their hard media. CDs, DVDs and LPs are still sold in large numbers.
Of the old hard media, printed books have diminished the least in affection and sales. One frequently sees essays on the superiority of print over electronic reading matter as being easier on the eyes and less distracting, and more likely to enhance comprehension. Readers extol the pleasure of turning pages, of the heft of volumes, the texture of the pages. Writers on the joy of printed books don’t often give advice about where to store thousands of them.
I was once in thrall to the romance of printed books. I enjoyed prowling bookstores, especially ones selling used books. The hunt for hard-to-find volumes and the distinct musty smell of old hardcovers kept me roaming the shelves for years. The big mass-market bookstores – B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, Borders, Barnes & Noble – had their own charms, as they were stocked to rafters with inviting reading. I couldn’t leave one without carrying away at least three or four books.
That is, until I started running out of space to put them all. For many years I accumulated books like a crow collects shiny objects. Even after I read the books, or in many cases set them on a shelf and didn’t read them, they remained in my library. I was part of that subculture for whom one’s library was a status symbol. I wanted people who visited to see how well-read I was, or at least pretended to be. I was like those quasi-celebrities whose libraries are occasionally profiled in the Washington Post. Such libraries are more to be seen than read.
Two things started to change my mind about printed books – a problem and a solution. The problem was that I eventually ran out of room for all my books. After employing every creative means I could to display them – squeezing shelves into every available space, hanging shelves on walls – I finally resorted to culling the herd by giving some away. At first it was like giving away my children, but as I hardened myself to the task I saw its advantages. Books no longer were taking over my space, and I had room to store or display other belongings.
But then came the ultimate solution: e-books. I could have all the books I wanted and they took up no space at all. Over the years I bought fewer print books, and then virtually none at all, while my library of e-books multiplied. After going through several rounds of selecting books to part with and enjoying the reduction in clutter, I didn’t want to bring more books into the house only to have to go through the culling again. I could have my books and my space too.
I have always taken books with me when traveling. A book is the best companion for a plane ride and for slack hours at your destination, especially in inclement weather. A book is a must for the beach. But for a long trip, dragging along a lot of books, especially if some were big and fat, became a burden. I did my best reading on the move, but my thickest books tended to stay at home. Now I can carry War and Peace, the complete works of Mark Twain and Shakespeare, and anything else wherever I go, courtesy of my phone app.
And then there are the trees. The manufacture of smart phones and tablets present their own environmental concerns, but they don’t involve killing trees for book paper. Save the trees!
I do feel for the booksellers, whose business has been drying up little by little. I also miss visiting bookstores, but I forced myself to stay out in the way I learned to shun ice cream parlors. Being there was nice but ultimately fattening – metaphorically in the case of bookstores. I know I can’t browse a bookstore without buying something, so I stay away. I’ve worked too hard to trim my collection to undo my effort by adding to it.
The slow death of hard media is hard for people who cherish their collections of books, CDs and DVDs. But it is unstoppable; it has killed off many formats and printed books are in the sights. We can sigh for the old days, as my parents did for their Victrolas and console radios, while also recognizing the advantages of the new.
Outside the Box 