| > 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? |