Today’s reading

I’ve made a rule for myself: no more buying print books.

I just don’t read them. They gather dust.

Now you might well ask what’s changed my attitude, given that I have some 3,662 of these (I think they’re all on LibraryThing but I’m sure there are the odd tomes that have escaped cataloguing) at home. I never used to have a problem accumulating them and building towers of To Read piles…

The answer: ebooks.

Now I can carry my reading material on a neat little tablet, I can’t seem to bring myself to go back to paper.

Wait, you say. Not everything is available digitally yet, is it?

Well, no, it’s not, but I’m at that point now where, if it’s not available online I’d rather wait for this, rather than buy more paper. Availability for Australian readers seems to be improving somewhat. Just a year ago at least half the books I wanted to read were not available to me. This year, I’ve been caught a couple of times – buying things in print because I really wanted to read them and I couldn’t find a legit (or even not legit) ebook version anywhere, and then three, six months later, et voilà! The title is available in ebook. (Gazes at print copies of Walking the Talk by Carolyn Taylor, Independent People by Halldór Laxness, A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, On Becoming A Leader by Warren Bennis…)

So does this mean I have become some sort of Super Reader? I no longer have huge To Read Lists? Okay… no. The To Read List is now almost 100% digital. However, where my track record of actually reading things used to be poor, I am now finding I am reading more widely. In the days of paper, I would only carry one book around at a time and it was almost invariably fiction. Now this is not limited, I dip in and out of things a lot more. Yes, still reading fiction, but also histories, biographies, travelogues, even management/leadership texts! Hence my level of professional reading has increased. This is a good thing.

A few of us were chatting about this on Twitter yesterday (@heyjudeonline, @katiedavis, @snailx) and it seems I am not the only one for whom the format has changed. There was some discussion about formats – will we regret shifting to e? What if technology changes render our libraries unreadable? There is always a chance of that, I guess. All you can do is to take steps to back up your collection (noting that DRM actually makes it rather difficult, if not impossible, to do so, because you can’t copy DRMed books). Print may be more durable in some respects, but it too can be destroyed, and it certainly is a lot bulkier than digital (mobility trumps durability for me).

I have lost my interest in bookshops. I don’t need to go to a bookshop to find out what’s new – I have publishers’ tweets and my favourite lit bloggers (topic for another post!) for that. In any case, I’m not really all that interested in the newest thing. I tend to read whatever piques my interest, and this can be material that was published decades ago. Interestingly, for material that is not new, but not yet “classic”, it can sometimes be rather difficult to get it electronically. Much of the discussion on Twitter was precipitated by the fact that a couple of books I requested on InterLibrary Loan arrived yesterday – Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) and The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop (1983) – neither of which I have been able to source electronically. (Poetry is particularly difficult to find, if you want books rather than just individual poems.) I must say, the two books are very nicely worn cloth covered editions. They do feel good in the hand. They are, however, bulky, and I’m not sure I am going to want to lug either of them around on my daily commute. And of course, there was a small problem when I flicked through Native Speaker:

I’ll let you know if I do manage to read these two books. I suspect the poetry will be “easier”, as I will be able to dip in and out of it from time to time. Can’t do that so enjoyably with a novel, though.

In a year’s time it will be interesting to see how things will have continued to change for me.