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Seriously? You wouldn't even pay, say, $0.99 to rent a book? I pay more than that, in time and gasoline, every time I check a book out from the library. Just driving to the library or the post office, spending 10 minutes, then driving back is a 30-minute commitment for me. If my time is worth $20 per hour, that's $10 right there, not counting the cost of gas or the odds that the book I want isn't available. Unless I'm very diligent about checking out books in large batches (and how many books can I really read before my three weeks is up and they become due at the library?) I might be saving money with a Kindle [1], even if each book self-destructed, Mission-Impossible style, three months after I paid $10 for it. Which they don't. I am an old-school book collector; it runs in my family. And, yet, when I look at my shelves I dream of actually owning fewer of them. The world has changed. Amazon and Abebooks exist now. By this point, very few of my books are sufficiently precious and sufficiently likely to go out of print that I need to physically hoard them myself -- such books do exist, but they're much fewer in number, perhaps no more than a single bookshelf's worth. Yeah, I guess the apocalypse could wipe out Amazon and Abebooks, or the copyright Gestapo could create some kind of digital Fahrenheit 451. But, really, what are the odds? To worry too much about that is like hoarding beer because Prohibition might come back. I'm literally more worried about my house burning down. I'll worry when we reach the point that important books are routinely published in electronic form alone, with no paper copies anywhere. But I don't think that will ever happen. Indeed, the preservation of archival versions might become an even more significant raison d'etre for paper publishers -- we really need more archives, and more librarians and editors, to select, print out, and preserve all the great blog posts and HN comments that will otherwise be lost to linkrot, or buried in spam and rendered unfindable, within my lifetime. I still love libraries. Shelves of books make me happy. But that thrill is not what it once was. Because it was the exciting feeling of knowing that you were surrounded by the work of centuries of scholars, that the world's knowledge was within reach. And that's true all the time now. I live in a library 24/7. I have to take special measures, like hiking out of cellular range, to escape that feeling of being surrounded by knowledge. I could sit here in this chair for the rest of my life and never run out of interesting things to read, watch, or listen to, so long as someone keeps paying the Comcast bill. --- [1] Ignoring the cost of buying the Kindle in the first place, of course. |