[arandr0x]

It's not the method (my method is pick a shelf and look at titles, and yes, it's doable online), it's that:

1) online there's just too much stuff. Libraries culling a ton of inventory serves the purpose of the really bad books being off the (real) shelf in relatively short order. Dig through Amazon's Kindle ebooks store to have an idea how much all-digital suffers from lack of this. As well as

2) I have developed, from years of reading, the ability to look at a shelf with the full aperture of my vision, and in that single glance, pick patterns of letters on the book spines such that I can identify interesting titles at a rate of maybe 200 books per minute. I understand non-readers and people who buy books off of somebody else's review list don't have that ability, but I don't see why I should be deprived of something that literally saves me 30 minutes a week to cater to, well, people who don't actually like books.

3) Some of the best books I have read at used bookstores and librairies simply don't have a digital form. They're locally published books from decades past that probably sold in the 1000 to 10000 copies range. Newer books in that space always have a digital edition, but there is a ton to learn from the past, and I often read because I am tired of existing within my own time/space bound, hearing about the same concerns. If I want to know what my contemporaries think, I can have a conversation. To learn how people I will never have the chance to meet think, I read books. (To learn how people I will never have the chance to meet really think, I read novels.)

Now 1) could be solved by an algorithm, but I write algorithms for a living and I don't trust them. 2) is trickier. 3) is definitely solvable but the economic incentives don't align, and I trust the markets even less than the algorithms.

[int_19h]

> Libraries culling a ton of inventory serves the purpose of the really bad books being off the (real) shelf in relatively short order. Dig through Amazon's Kindle ebooks store to have an idea how much all-digital suffers from lack of this.

Sounds like an unintended but desirable effect. Why not make it intended, and design for it directly? Libraries could have a curated collection that they promote, and archives of all the other stuff.

> I have developed, from years of reading, the ability to look at a shelf with the full aperture of my vision, and in that single glance, pick patterns of letters on the book spines such that I can identify interesting titles at a rate of maybe 200 books per minute. I understand non-readers and people who buy books off of somebody else's review list don't have that ability, but I don't see why I should be deprived of something that literally saves me 30 minutes a week to cater to, well, people who don't actually like books.

For starters, that's a very offensive assumption you're making here - that people who don't have that skill "don't actually like books". Have you considered that they might be reading several books every month, just not paper books like you?

But also, that skill you describe is equally applicable to all kinds of lists. If you can do that with books on the shelf, you can learn to do that with a screen. I mean, do we really need to subsidize shelves full of paper books solely to avoid making a few people's skills obsolete and require them to relearn if they want to remain as efficient as they were before?

Of course, digital makes things fundamentally different, anyway. Why browse long shelves, when you can do fuzzy contextual search?

[boomboomsubban]

> 1) could be solved by an algorithm, but I write algorithms for a living and I don't trust them.

Seems like one that needs a largely random algorithm with some additional weight for recent and popular works. Amazon has a separate goal to a library, using their stores isn't a fair comparison.

2 requires pictures or facsimiles of book spines, not particularly tricky. This entire process is ridiculous though. The only way you can spot anywhere near 200 interesting books in a minute is if every book is interesting, what you're actually judging is likely a marketing decision, and you have no reason to expect your picks were particularly good.

3 is a copyright issue. Google books already has a surprising number of those books archived, and your chance of reading them would be far greater if they just required one random person to find the book and upload it. Even still, in 20 years the digital libraries will be overflowing with people you can't meet talking about experiences you can't encounter.

[arandr0x]

Yes, I think all three issues won't be issues in 20 or 30 years. I fully expect my children to grow up being able to "spot" digital titles the way I do with spines, and looking at the physical books roughly the way I looked at my grandma's physical ledger-book. (Edited: Although I think you misunderstood me on 3. I am willing to pay for those books, provided the price is sustainable considering the quantity I am consuming, and they are not in English, which may qualify what I meant when I say they largely don't exist digitally currently.)

I meant I can classify 200 books as interesting or not in a minute, obviously not find 200 interesting ones. It takes me 15 minutes to find 4 or 5 books I actually want to read.

One unfortunate side effects of books moving to digital (although, to be clear, books moving to digital is not remotely a bad thing in itself) is that they are getting longer. There is fewer and fewer pressure on authors to limit the length of newer books that are unproven, with the result that people who don't know how to speed read are seeing reading novels as more and more of a daunting thing, which I think is sad.