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> and that I have nothing to put on my shelf. Why do you need anything to put on a shelf? I, for one, am glad that books don't need to take up physical space
by mikevm 13y ago
> and that I have nothing to put on my shelf.
Why do you need anything to put on a shelf?
I, for one, am glad that books don't need to take up physical space anymore.
- dagw 13y agoWhy do you need anything to put on a shelf? Because it adds to the room. I realize this is very much a question of personal taste, but I find that a room with a wall covered in books can be a beautiful design detail that adds warmth and character to a room. Plus physical books are pretty awesome in their own right.
- zanny 13y agoI get it is asthetic taste, but I love whenever I move somewhere and I literally have nothing but white walls, bare floors, a desk, a bed, and a few drawers of clothes and necesssary accessories. It feels very clean to me. I don't like cluttering up space for no reason than to occupy it.
- mikevm 13y agoSame here. Plus, those of us that do move once in a while know that books weigh a ton. When I helped my dad move, I think the boxes that had his books weighed more than his fridge ;-).
- claudius 13y agoPack boxes of 50% books and 50% clothing/computer parts/bedding/everything else to make the boxes lighter and get a good indication when you have enough books (i.e. when they really do make up 50% of the content of your boxes).
- dagw 13y agoAs I said, it's all a matter of taste, but I love 'clutter'. As long as it's my clutter placed by me to my exact specifications (other peoples clutter is different matter all together). I find it really hard to concentrate or relax in a too sterile environment.
- mindcrime 13y agoSame here. I especially like being surrounded by books. This is probably why I have WAY too many books in my apartment (it looks like the apartment of the book guy in that movie Unfaithful but more cluttered) and why I often go sit at the Barnes & Noble cafe to work, as opposed to going to, say, Starbucks or Panera Bread. I'm a fan of e-books and definitely think they have their place (I've purchased a total of 3 Nook devices over the years), but I am not ready to wholesale walk away from dead-tree books either.
- hyperbovine 13y agoI agree with you re: aesthetics, yet part of me still can't believe that, in the age of iPhones and self-driving cars, we still transmit large amounts of information by grinding up trees and shipping them all over the planet. I'll miss books, but I won't be sad to see them go.
- jimgardener 13y agoI feel that a physical book is like a lover.By the time you read the last page you either establish a bond with it or throw it away..I never felt that kind of bond with the contents of my eReader(which feels more like a one night stand :)
- vidarh 13y agoI'm with you regarding the space. On the other hand I also think digital-only profoundly affects how I interact with books in a way I don't like (see a lengthy comment elsewhere with more on that). Putting a book on a shelf is much like putting photos on the wall to make them a constant part of your life instead of burying them in a photo album.
- triplepoint217 13y agoPlus, walking into someone's house and seeing a bookshelf full of awesome books is a good way to know that I am probably going to like said person.
- claudius 13y agoAnd, conversely, up until ebooks existed, walking into a flat without any books was a clear indicator that I’d be rather bored by the person living there.
- VLM 13y agoI believe amazon added twitter integration to ebook ordering four years ago, so from a social signalling perspective, going virtual doesn't mean going in cold. There are interior decorators who know about our observational biases and will specify books on shelves to match a "look" although the client will probably never crack the book open. Once I learned that, the utility of analyzing bookshelves dropped a bit. Have to actually read to be interesting, merely owning an unread book isn't very interesting. This impacts the public library user pretty intensely, because they can read a lot without having the interior decorating to prove it.
- claudius 13y agoI’m not part of the age group yet where people would be able to afford books only to look good to their peers. And while you are certainly right that public libraries might make it possible to read many books without owning any, I found that most people who like books use them to read more books, but still get the usual 5-10 books per birthday/christmas/you-name-it to fill their bookshelves. Of course it is a heuristic and there are both false negatives and positives, so YMMV.
- VLM 13y ago"I’m not part of the age group yet where people would be able to afford books only to look good to their peers." Agreed that probably pretty expensive if you're trying to pose as a foodie complete with "Modernist Cuisine" and all that. On the other hand, "Vintage classic worn leather covers, organized on the shelf by color" that stuff is shoveled out by the pound. The expensive part is hiring the interior decorator, not buying the shoveled books. Bringing it home to HN I suspect for many here, there are some copies of Knuth, and the little scheme series, and numerous others, on some peoples bookshelves that look nice but have avoided reading...
- anonymouz 13y agoIt is decorative, visitors can easily get a glance on what I am reading and might pick out something that interests them, and last but not least: archival purposes. I feel confident that, say, 50 years from now, most of my physical books will still be around somewhere (maybe in a room, maybe in a moving box), and waiting to be picked up to be read. With my ebooks I am not so sure that I'll be disciplined about keeping backups on contemporary storage material, have a reader still able to read the format or a tool to convert them easily.
- Havoc 13y ago>50 years from now, most of my physical books will still be around I must admit I don't share your confidence in modern book making methods. I've had books fall apart after a couple of months, so I don't see 50 years happening. Its the same with CD & DVD...we are promised many years of safe storage but in practice they fail soon.
- vidarh 13y agoI have good chunk of books that are 25+ years and still look close to new, so 50 years sounds easy to achieve for all but the most well worn books. For my digital media I'm paranoid - I have a mirrored NAS, rsynced to a third drive, copies on my laptop, and two offsite backups of most of my media, and I'm still concerned about how easy it is to lose it. Especially as most of my early writing (of little value to anyone but me, but of great sentimental value) only survives on printouts - even faded acidic printer paper from the early 80's to early 90's have long outlasted the storage media holding the files it was saved on. Not because disks can't live long, but because the density and relative fragility makes it so much easier to lose or damage the data.
- Havoc 13y ago>I have good chunk of books that are 25+ years Exactly. They were made 25 years ago. I'm talking about books being printed right now. Quality is not what it once was.
- DanBC 13y agoDiscoverability and serendipity. I want my son to be able to pull down an atlas and noodle through it, or Brewer's dictionary of phrase and fable, or {insert long list of books here}. That's harder for him to do if they're all stuck on a disc somewhere.
- UVB-76 13y agoIt sounds awfully romantic, but who needs it? Give your kid a tablet, and they have instant access to more books, films, television shows, etc. than you could ever hope to fit in your home. Why flick through an atlas when you have services like Google Maps which are more useful (route planning, satellite imagery, 3D visuals, etc.)? Why flick through a physical copy of Brewer's, when you can scroll through a digital copy, or just browse the Internet and find all that information and more?
- DanBC 13y agoBut people don't find that stuff on the internet. it is presented to them via sites like digg, reddit, HN, b3ta, etc etc. curation is important.
- sien 13y agoOn the other hand searching for some text in a hundred physical books is very inconvenient. Also with an ereader travelling is fantastic. A library in less than 300 gm. It's also easier to access that library on your phone which is with many people all the time. Not to mention access for your kids to millions of legal free ebooks.
- dredmorbius 13y agoOn the other hand searching for some text in a hundred physical books is very inconvenient. Search _is_ one application where electronic copies definitely can surpass physical books. Though if I know the author and work, I can often flip to a page pretty quickly. Especially if there's an index, but even without, I have a pretty good sense of where in a book a passage occurred, even position on the page.
- Bulkington 13y agoVanity, mainly, along with the fun of pulling and exploring a title, and the feel and smell of a volume; and as others have mentioned, much of my scholastic head start came from the books in our family library. Was I precocious, or just a curious kid with a great resource at his fingertips? The latter, I think. (I moved into my father's study when my youngest brother was born and three boys age 4 and under in a small room was problematic--so I literally slept with books when I was learning to read.) I also know my kids don't read nearly as much as I did, so encouraging them to peruse the media server just isn't the same as letting them chill in the home library, and procrastinate from formal assignments by checking out the old man's books. (I will admit to dog-earing the naughty bits of some of my parents racy paperbacks.) Once expansive touchscreens are cheap, of course, we can display a virtual wall of bookshelves and instantly load a text on the device of choice, or even print on demand. And I also know I haven't bought a hard copy book in several years and I love being able to travel with a substantial library (and music collection). All I'll ever need is a little electricity to keep a tablet charged. (Assuming an easy way to move my collection to the next gen device.) Choice. Choice. Choice. (EDIT: Oh yeah--merci, Calibre.)
- mikevm 13y ago> Once expansive touchscreens are cheap, of course, we can display a virtual wall of bookshelves and instantly load a text on the device of choice, or even print on demand. This is exactly what I had in mind when reading some of the comments. "Discoverability and serendipity", as DanBC pointed out is fixable by this technology. But you don't need huge touchscreens. A medium-sized one (55"?) with something like Cover Flow, where different books slowly move across the screen might be a pretty good solution.
- ekianjo 13y ago> ...am glad that books don't need to take up physical space anymore. The problem is that when stuff is out of sight, you don't even think that it is there. Look at the Internet: it's a massive amount of information and you just don't even know what you could ever find unless you spend time searching for it. When something is physically tangible, it's way easier to locate it and to think about it. That's how our brains work.