Let me start by saying that books are awesome. I went without reading for several years after I graduated from high school, and I realize now that that was a big mistake. I’ll talk about that in a minute, but first let’s talk about why books need to disappear.
Like most people, I have a huge bookshelf of books that I only read once and will probably never read again. We hold onto them like trophies, unwilling to destroy them or give them away, which is understandable considering how much we paid for them. Pocket books for $10, soft covers for $20, hard covers for $60… what’s going on here? Why is a soft cover book $20 when you buy it at a bookstore, and 50 cents when you sell it at a garage sale the next summer? People are only willing to pay 25 to 50 cents for books at a garage sale, so that’s what a used book is worth. From $25 to 25 cents, that means that books depreciate by 99% as soon as you take them out of the store. Am I the only one who has a problem with this?
Of course, the bookstore sometimes gets rid of their unsold or damaged overstock for up to 90% off, so obviously the profit margin on books is pretty high. How much do you suppose it actually costs to make a book, from the cost of materials and production to the expense of transporting it to the store. Probably no more than a dollar, right? The markup on books is huge. What’s especially galling is that huge row of “Classics” for $9.99, where publishers reprint books that have fallen into the public domain and charge almost as much for them as new books! The profit margin on a book whose author didn’t have to be paid is nearly 100%!
That’s why it boggles my mind that people still buy books. For well over a century we’ve had a useful service call the library! Why would anyone pay for books when they could borrow them for free? And that realization is what got me back into reading a few months ago. I hadn’t been to a library in almost a decade!
My local library is large, but they often don’t have the books I want, but they’re available at other libraries in the city. I simply ask for a copy and it gets sent to my local library for free. I live in a metropolis of over a million people with well over a dozen libraries, and yet some of the books I wanted to read weren’t available anywhere in my local library system. For those books, I’ve requested an interlibrary loan, and amazingly those books have been sent from other parts of the province to my library, once again for free. It takes longer to get a book that way, and you can’t borrow it for as long. I really enjoyed one of the books that I read and I would like to read it again, but I don’t want to wait for it to arrive from some distant corner of the country. A surprising thought came to my head: I should buy this book!
So, here’s my philosophy on book buying. You should only buy a book if you absolutely, positively will read it again and again. That means that your personal library should have only a small selection of your all-time favourite books. Every other book should be borrowed from the library. You shouldn’t have a wall full of books!
Actually, I propose something even more radical than that: you shouldn’t have any books at all. Let’s face it, books are expensive, they take up a lot of space, and they have no resale value. Why on earth are we still buying them? I had high hopes that books would disappear when the eBook appeared more than a decade ago, but reading books on my computer screen was no fun at all. I have to sit at my computer to read an eBook, which prevents me from reading in the only two situations where I ever have the desire to read a book: lying in my warm, comfy bed; and when I’m at work, either because I arrived at work early and have some time before my shift, or if I’m waiting for a ride after work. My computer can’t do those things.
Oh, but there are notebook computers now, right? Notebooks don’t help because they have to sit on your lap, but I want to recline in my bed and hold the book in the air. They’re also too large to conveniently pull out of my bag while I’m sitting at my desk or in the lobby. Besides which, they still have the second major problem with reading books on your computer: the computer screen.
I hate reading book on a computer screen. Despite wonderful innovations like ClearType, which makes fonts look smoother, computer screens just don’t look as nice as printed pages. Whether I have to sit at my computer to read a book, which I don’t like to do, or whether I have to carry a (relatively) big, heavy notebook computer, they can’t compete with the print quality, ease and convenience of a real book. Books are small, weigh practically nothing, and they have printed pages. As the librarian asked me when I talked to her about eBooks, “Why would anyone want to read a book on a computer?”
So, a few years ago I started hearing about eInk. The concept is that science can now produce an LCD screen that can produce text that is as crisp and clear as a printed page, and put it in a device that’s about the size and weight of a real book. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it! Then, along came Amazon (who else?) with the Kindle, an eInk reader that could hold 200 books. Now the Kindle 2 is out, and it’s faster, lighter, displays 16 shades of grey (up from 4), and has enough memory to hold about 1500 books (2 GB). Is it time for books to disappear? I say yes!
