e-Books

[stevekenson]

That's what I could use: some electronic books. The ones in Portable Document Format (PDF) or something similar.

If there were some sort of trade-in deal, I could easily shift 80% of my library over to searchable, storable, portable electronic media. A great many of my books are ultimately reference books: I don't read a lot of gaming core rulebooks from cover to cover. I keep a lot of them around for those occasions when I want to look up an obscure rule, reference, game mechanic, or somesuch. The same is largely true of my portion of Christoper's and my shared library of occult books: mostly stuff I reference. Still, it's all stuff I do (or might) reference, so I can't just get rid of it all, but it takes up so much shelf space. So: e-books.

I've been acquiring more PDF files, but still I've got lots and lots of dead-tree books around already. I wish there was a "real book for virutal book" trade-in service where I could exchange the printed book for a PDF or the like. I can't justify paying for a lot of the books again in electronic format, nor can I justify getting rid of the hardcopies I have without still having something I can reference on occasion. If I could magically transform the bulk of my library to fit on my hard drive, I would do it.

Note, however, I'm not against real books, far from it. I still love holding and reading a good book. I just think I need to start being more particular about the actual books I acquire long-term, unless I want to eventually move to a bigger home in order to house them all.

Comments

[gwelt.livejournal.com]

I empathize with you. At the end of February the church I go to is having a used book sale. I am the chairperson of the event so I am going through my books a number of times to thin my collection. Fiction is easy. Unfortunately I have very few fiction books. Of the non-fiction definite keepers are- Ones I haven't read or finished yet("Conversations with God", "Necronomicon"-Donald Tyson's version-etc) , Classic works ("Key of Solomon", "777" etc.) and modern reference faves ("Grimore of the Green Witch", "Seidways" etc.) But that still leaves too many books and not enough space.

[doccross.livejournal.com]

I hear ya, dude. I have tons of books that I look at maybe a couple times a year for reference. The rest of the time they just gather dust.

After having rearranged our library (which holds all of my games and maybe 80% of our books), I told Grace that we have 5 years or less before we either have to add another library room to this house or buy/build another house.