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Too many books
May. 28th, 2013 06:10 pmI am at that stage of "Oh god I need to clean up this office" where I have to face the fact that I have Too Many Books. No, really, I have completely run out of room in the downstairs bookcases again, so if I want to put away the teetering piles of "have read it but not yet logged it", something's got to leave. Which means I have to decide what's going to Oxfam.
And once again I am wishing that the Big 6/5... publishers would quit with the DRM nonsense. I have here a box full of books I bought on remainder where I would be only too happy to give the publisher the full cover price in order to buy an electronic copy the next time I want to read it. But I want to *buy* it, not rent it. If it's locked to a specific device, or specific credit card, or a specific cloud account, it ain't mine.
One of the reasons this matters to me is that I've hit the age where I do not have endless vistas of reading time ahead of me. I went out for dinner last night, and found that my current pair of handbag reading glasses can no longer cope with restaurant menus in restaurant lighting. And at current reading rates, I have around ten years worth of books in this house, and that's just the fiction. I have a lot of books where I liked them enough that I might want to read them again, but may not get to them for a re-read in the next few years. I'm accumulating more of them. The reality is that "a few years" may take it past my personal reading event horizon. And many of these books are ones where I don't have much attachment to the physical object. I'd be perfectly happy to shift the physical object out of the door as long as I'm reasonably sure I can get hold of the text again if I *do* feel the urge to re-read. I have a lot more where I know I will want to re-read them but ditto on the physical object.
I think it's time to give in, install Calibre and learn how to use naughty plug-ins. It will make it a lot easier to put that treeware book in the Oxfam box.
And once again I am wishing that the Big 6/5... publishers would quit with the DRM nonsense. I have here a box full of books I bought on remainder where I would be only too happy to give the publisher the full cover price in order to buy an electronic copy the next time I want to read it. But I want to *buy* it, not rent it. If it's locked to a specific device, or specific credit card, or a specific cloud account, it ain't mine.
One of the reasons this matters to me is that I've hit the age where I do not have endless vistas of reading time ahead of me. I went out for dinner last night, and found that my current pair of handbag reading glasses can no longer cope with restaurant menus in restaurant lighting. And at current reading rates, I have around ten years worth of books in this house, and that's just the fiction. I have a lot of books where I liked them enough that I might want to read them again, but may not get to them for a re-read in the next few years. I'm accumulating more of them. The reality is that "a few years" may take it past my personal reading event horizon. And many of these books are ones where I don't have much attachment to the physical object. I'd be perfectly happy to shift the physical object out of the door as long as I'm reasonably sure I can get hold of the text again if I *do* feel the urge to re-read. I have a lot more where I know I will want to re-read them but ditto on the physical object.
I think it's time to give in, install Calibre and learn how to use naughty plug-ins. It will make it a lot easier to put that treeware book in the Oxfam box.
