Bookshelf of books: "a thing of beauty"

Towards the end of last year I wrote about the Amazon Kindle "wireless reading device"; picking up the theme again, one of the regular readers of this blog has drawn my attention to an interesting article in The Independent on whether electronic books threaten the future of traditional publishing.

the iLiad e-book from iRex

Towards the end of the article, one of the arguments made for electronic books being "the end of books as we know it" is that:

Few people like the fact that books take up an inordinate amount of space in their houses and travel bags

It's news to me if people dislike having a large number of (physical) books in their houses. One of my colleagues commented that a bookshelf of books is "a thing of beauty", and I am inclined to agree with him - although another colleague admitted to having to periodically prune his book collection due to space restrictions.

Anyway, I've put up a poll on this blog (over on the top right) to find out whether people really don't like books cluttering up their homes.

And as for books taking up too much room in travel bags – an electronic book takes up just as much room as, and is almost certainly heavier than, one or two paperbacks. I suppose it depends on how long you are going away for and how quickly you read.