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My mother has an impressive library at home and I wonder what I will do with it someday. Ideally I would have a library take it as it, including the fantastic a
by BrandoElFollito 4y ago
My mother has an impressive library at home and I wonder what I will do with it someday. Ideally I would have a library take it as it, including the fantastic and less fantastic books (some are rarities, some are worthless).
We were trying to talk her into that already with my brother, but first she looked at is as if we started to run naked in the street, and then kindly asked us to mind our business :)
We managed, after years of effort, to talk her into using a digital reader (I do not remember how we managed to do that). She was always against, and then tried for a week, which turned into two and it is now two years she is using this almost exclusively.
Which is good because she is reading one or two books per week and loves to build the queue of what is left. Least time I checked, it was 100 books.
My father once decided to put some order in her library, starting with a small set of shelves. He sorted the books by size (or alphabetically, I do not remember). It was at a time my mouth was at the hospital, we drove her back home and discovered with her the cleanup, and a proud husband.
We sat comfortably with my brother with some imaginary popcorn to watch the scene what my father was fleeced alive after my mother realized that all her mess (that she knew by heart) was gone.
So yes, books are difficult to get rid of for some people.
- SiVal 4y agoTwo great arguments for digital readers for people like your mother and me: vision and size & weight. You love to read, but it gets physically more difficult as your eyes age. With a digital reader, every book is a "large print edition" with good lighting. And when you travel, you have to take several books because, well, duh! You have to have books when you travel. Obviously. But carrying heavy books is a (literal and literary) pain. And airlines are getting so stingy about baggage limits that I'm surprised they aren't yet charging extra if you want to wear shoes. You can put a whole library in a reader the size and weight of a shoe and take it when you travel. Of course some books are precious physical artifacts (to me) for whatever reason. I MUST keep those, but they are a minority. Most of the books I want to keep are wanted for their content, not their physical form, and those I'll get rid of if I can keep the content in digital form.
- BrandoElFollito 4y agohorrible typo: mouth should of course be mother :)