A Farewell To Books

So after the longest continuous period of my life spent living in the same house, we are moving into York in a few weeks time (subject to contract, etc., etc.). We’re not particularly hoarders, but after nearly 18 years, stuff has accumulated. In previous moves the question has been: what can’t we be bothered paying someone to move from one loft or garage into another? The question is even more relevant this time round, as we won’t have a garage anymore, nor much of a loft either. The cull begins.

Mostly I find getting rid of belongings quite therapeutic, with one large exception: my beloved books. I've been collecting since I was a child. I don’t know how many I’ve got, but the number will be well into four figures. There are shelves and shelves of books, with more books stacked up behind them if the shelf is deep enough. Other books sit in boxes in the loft, some unopened since they were put there in 1996.

It’s time for me to face some facts. I probably have enough unread books to keep me going till I die, and that’s assuming I don’t want to re-read any. In practice, nearly all the books I read from one month to the next are brand new ones, so what are the odds of me re-reading any or getting round to reading books which I bought in a book sale thirty years ago and have never opened since?

But it’s still going to be hard to reverse the habits of over four decades.

I begin to go through my collection. For some books it’s easy: they've fallen apart or the paper’s gone all orange, so they can go. Other’s are out of copyright, and it turns out I can get them for free off the internet. Bye, bye that copy of Little Dorrit, and the James Joyce book I was sure I’d read one day.

Dozens of others I haven’t looked at in 30 or 40 years. Yes, I enjoyed them at the time, but in truth I will never find time to read them again. All these can go too.

As the piles of culled books mount up I start to have doubts. Here I am going through hundreds of books that I know I read, even remember enjoying, but now can recall next to nothing of their contents. Reading is something that has taken up a substantial chunk of my free time, but if I can remember so little of it, what exactly was the point?

For the fiction it’s arguably not so bad: the enjoyment is largely in the reading itself. But I read a lot of non-fiction too; was it really a waste of time? Perhaps not—maybe I take in more than I realise. As a teenager I read Arnold Toynbee’s “Mankind & Mother Earth”, but never quite finished it. When I sat down a decade later to do the job properly, I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of the author’s arguments I had taken on board, without realising their source. Osmosis might be my ally sometimes, though nowadays I make notes as I go through a book, and review them later to try to lock more of the book’s content into that space between my ears.

More doubts now: how can I be really sure I won’t want to revisit these books one day? Would it cost much if I did? A small and doubtless unrepresentative sample on the web provides some hope. Many of the titles are available on the Kindle for just two or three pounds. And wait, there’s more: there are now online subscription services for books. Like with Spotify for music, you can pay a monthly subscription to an online library and read as many of their titles as you want. Scribd charge $9 a month, and I see seven of the books I'm chucking out straightaway on their front page. Oyster Books is another one. There’s even a Mills & Boon subscription service (which I mention purely for the sake of illustration).

In fact, it dawns on me that I’m already using two limited book subscription services. For a decade or so I've been a subscriber to the O’Reilly Safari technical library (which has saved me a small fortune on books about programming), while my Amazon Prime subscription lets me “borrow” one book a month on my Kindle. Their choice of books is fairly limited (I've only used it once), but I'm happy to see that it does include several I'm chucking out. I suspect time is on my side here, and the availability of books by subscription will continue to expand. Not brand new ones perhaps, but that doesn't matter as it's the older books I'm interested in, like the books I bought as a teenager for 30 or 40 pence.

So it looks like technology is going to let me get rid of my books after all without too many sad goodbyes—more like "Au Revoir".

Borrowing Books on a Kindle

I've just borrowed my first book on my Kindle.

This facility is only offered you if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber, which I've been since I read an overly optimistic article predicting that Amazon would soon give Kindles away to their Prime subscribers. In the US prime membership gives you several advantages; in the UK, until recently, it only gave you free next day delivery. As you can sign up your whole household for this, it's proved enough of a selling point to justify the £49 annual fee. It has also made me more impatient: I used to happily go for the free 'several day' delivery, but now I'm stupidly annoyed if any Amazon item isn't available for Prime next day delivery.

Very recently Amazon changed the rules so that Prime members could 'borrow' one book a month on their Kindle. A choice of 200,000 titles!

Sadly, when I investigated it seemed they were mostly by authors I'd never heard of. That makes sense: if you're fairly unknown you can try raising your profile by effectively giving a few titles away. However, I've got a back reading list several bookshelves long already, without adding some more authors to it.

Then today I went looking for a Kindle Single that I'd heard recommended. Imagine my delight when I noticed I could borrow it. (Thus saving me the princely sum of £1.96!)

And the tactic worked. An Unexpected Twist by Andy Borowitz is a little delight, hilarious and moving. It only took 15 minutes to read, and I've already paid for another one of his books, Who Moved My Soap?: The CEO's Guide to Surviving in Prison.

Now a month to kill while I find another book I want to borrow. 199,999 choices left.

What the Kindle is missing

I recently started reading The Bodhisattva's Brain by Owen Flanagan, published by the MIT Press. This isn't about the contents of the book, interesting though they look. Instead it's about the feel of a really nice book.

Everything about this book is appealing: the simplicity of the front cover design, the superb quality of the typography and printing, the texture of the high quality paper, and above all, the delicious smell of a new book.

I have a Kindle, and I read a lot on it, and I'm happy with it in its way. I'm sure that e-readers are the way the book industry is going. And yet...the experience of reading a book on a Kindle (I cannot speak for Nooks or other devices, but I doubt they're very different) lacks the magic of holding and smelling a really well produced, physical, paper book.

No doubt it will get better. In the meantime, someone has tried to close the gap by bottling the scent of a book. At nearly £70 a bottle I won't be rushing out to buy it any time soon, but I'm pleased to find that people are working on the problem already. Perhaps Kindles will one day come with this smell impregnated in their casing.

And perhaps one day the resolution of its screen will match the skills of the MIT Press and its printers.

Reading in the Age of Plenty

I have always been a book reader. As a child, and all the way up to my university graduation, I would read pretty well every book that came into my possession. My income was barely sufficient to feed my need for books.

But then I moved into the world of work and salaries, and found I could just buy a book if I felt like it. A single foray into a bookshop might see me coming out with half a dozen new books to read, and the list of unread books started to lengthen.

I still have nearly all of them, piled up in bookcases around the house. For most of them I can even remember where I acquired them. Running the book stall at jumble sales for many years didn't help, as there would usually be some books remaining at the end that I felt inclined to provide a home for.

About the middle of last year I resolved that all new books I bought would go onto a pile in my bedroom, to remind me how much money I was wasting on books that never got read. When one pile had become three piles I decided to pretty well stop buying books until I'd caught up. Somewhat to my surprise this has mostly worked, and the piles are going down. Only Amazon is the loser.

Only now they've brought out a Kindle at a price I'd consider paying (£109). That, plus my natural nerd tendency to want nerd toys, makes me suspect I will soon own one of these devices. But what of my resolution about buying new books? Should I first purchase the eBook versions of the ones on my piles? No. Fortunately I'm too tight for that.

Ah, but I did say I wouldn't 'buy' any new books. Turns out that there are eBooks you don't have to pay for: The Amazon Kindle Store lets you choose from thousands of the most popular classics, all available for free.

Garhh! Are these people mad? The classics! These are books I've spent nearly my whole life thinking I really ought to get round to reading someday before I die. In under an hour I could download more classics than I could read in what's left of my lifetime for no more cost than a few pence on my electricity bill. I'd have to either renounce any pretensions to culture, or admit that the battle to finish reading all my books was finally and definitely lost.

My sole consolation is that e-books do not make a very tall pile.