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.

7 comments:

Gloom Raider said...

I voted "yes" with a caveat

Gloom Raider said...

Oops... I meant to say that for the last week, I've been moving my books from my third-floor apartment to my new third-floor apartment. Due to space constraints, I'll have 4 bookcases in my walk-in closet. When I don't have to transport them, however, I love my books...

TootsNYC said...

My daughter packed 20 books for our 2-week vacation in hawaii.

I would want SOME books in my home (and I prefer a paper format in many instances), but honestly, if I felt that Kindle was truly going to take off as a platform, and that it would be possible to get many books on it, I would do most of my leisure reading on it.

Anonymous said...

I used to be of the "bookshelf is a thing of beauty mindset" but got tired of hauling those things of beauty from one place to the next... after pruning the collection back, I started to feel that lack of clutter was also a thing of beauty...

Anonymous said...
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The Ridger, FCD said...

Well, let's see. I'm in a hotel room right now looking at five paperbacks and two hardbacks and contemplating the probability that I will have to buy another one at an airport tomorrow ... maybe not.

But I'm still partial to books I can write in, lend out, and read in sunlight.

JD (The Engine Room) said...

Just for the record, the results of the poll were: 30 people liked having lots of books in their house, two people disliked it, and one person didn't mind.

Fairly conclusive! Although I'm not sure the readers of this blog are representative of the population as a whole...