[Discussion] Thoughts on owning books
Aug. 6th, 2024 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anehan posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
booknookCrossposted to my journal.
I've always liked books as objects. I'd like to be a person who owns books, which is distict from being a person who reads books. I haven't been able to be as much of a person who owns books as I would have wished to, both because my income used to be very small and because that very small income meant having small living quarters. No space for multiple bookshelves; no money for buying the bookshelves; no money for buying the books.
Things have since changed. While I don't have enough space to have very many bookshelves, nor the money to fill very many bookshelves, I am solidly middle class in terms of income these days, and that does mean an increased book budget. Ebooks help, too. They are cheaper and take up less space, and while they don't give me the same joy that physical books do, they are still books.
The thing is, I'm also a person who doesn't like to own things they don't use. I don't want to have something just to have it, and that includes books both physical and electronic. "If I'm not reading those books, why do I have them?" asks the minimalist me, while the part of me that likes owning nice things sputters, "But, books!"
But what does it mean to read books? What does it mean to have use of them? It's not quite as simple as just reading them right now, or rereading them regularly. Case in point: Captive Prince.
Captive Prince by C.S. Pacat is one of the first ebooks I ever bought. Calibre says the date I added it to my library is October 24, 2015, though I must have actually bought it some time before that, probably in 2014. For some reason, I didn't feel like reading it, and I kept not feeling like reading it until spring 2024, when I felt like reading something that would be a bit grittier than what I'd been reading but that would still give me my romance fix. Captive Prince, with its laundry list of content warnings, seemed like a good fit, and it was. I read the whole trilogy in two days. That's how much I loved it.
If I had bought a physical copy of Captive Prince, would I have culled it at some point, thinking I was never going to read it? Would I have felt that ten years is surely too long for a book to take up valuable bookshelf space? If I had, I wouldn't have had it on hand when I finally was in the mood for it, and that would have been a shame.
I buy most of my novels in ebook form these days, so I rarely need to worry about having to buy a new release immediately for fear of its going out of print. And yet, it isn't difficult to imagine ebooks suddenly being unavailable either, especially when published by small publishers or the authors themselves. It isn't even difficult to imagine an ebook being removed because pressure has been brought to bear on the publisher or the author to do so for one reason or another. At that point, piracy becomes the only option, since getting a second-hand copy of an ebook-only release is impossible.
I indicated that this post was a discussion post. I don't know what I'm discussing, precisely, so if you have thoughts on the vaguely defined topic of "owning books", I'd love to hear them. If I have any conclusions I've come to here, it's this: I just really love books.
I've always liked books as objects. I'd like to be a person who owns books, which is distict from being a person who reads books. I haven't been able to be as much of a person who owns books as I would have wished to, both because my income used to be very small and because that very small income meant having small living quarters. No space for multiple bookshelves; no money for buying the bookshelves; no money for buying the books.
Things have since changed. While I don't have enough space to have very many bookshelves, nor the money to fill very many bookshelves, I am solidly middle class in terms of income these days, and that does mean an increased book budget. Ebooks help, too. They are cheaper and take up less space, and while they don't give me the same joy that physical books do, they are still books.
The thing is, I'm also a person who doesn't like to own things they don't use. I don't want to have something just to have it, and that includes books both physical and electronic. "If I'm not reading those books, why do I have them?" asks the minimalist me, while the part of me that likes owning nice things sputters, "But, books!"
But what does it mean to read books? What does it mean to have use of them? It's not quite as simple as just reading them right now, or rereading them regularly. Case in point: Captive Prince.
Captive Prince by C.S. Pacat is one of the first ebooks I ever bought. Calibre says the date I added it to my library is October 24, 2015, though I must have actually bought it some time before that, probably in 2014. For some reason, I didn't feel like reading it, and I kept not feeling like reading it until spring 2024, when I felt like reading something that would be a bit grittier than what I'd been reading but that would still give me my romance fix. Captive Prince, with its laundry list of content warnings, seemed like a good fit, and it was. I read the whole trilogy in two days. That's how much I loved it.
If I had bought a physical copy of Captive Prince, would I have culled it at some point, thinking I was never going to read it? Would I have felt that ten years is surely too long for a book to take up valuable bookshelf space? If I had, I wouldn't have had it on hand when I finally was in the mood for it, and that would have been a shame.
I buy most of my novels in ebook form these days, so I rarely need to worry about having to buy a new release immediately for fear of its going out of print. And yet, it isn't difficult to imagine ebooks suddenly being unavailable either, especially when published by small publishers or the authors themselves. It isn't even difficult to imagine an ebook being removed because pressure has been brought to bear on the publisher or the author to do so for one reason or another. At that point, piracy becomes the only option, since getting a second-hand copy of an ebook-only release is impossible.
I indicated that this post was a discussion post. I don't know what I'm discussing, precisely, so if you have thoughts on the vaguely defined topic of "owning books", I'd love to hear them. If I have any conclusions I've come to here, it's this: I just really love books.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-06 07:30 pm (UTC)As for physical books, I do really like to own them, and I especially like to very-slowly be in the process of cataloguing them with little barcode stickers so I can have them all up on a tinycat library that I can search through.
That is very nice ♡ I’m currently buying a lot of danmei (baihe published here when?), and already have some light novels, that I actually have no intertwined of reading right now or in the foreseeable future but want to have. Some of them I do think I might want to read later. Some possibly not. One series I bought, read the end to double-check the ending was okay and misunderstood, decided not to read the series but kept them anyway because I liked the covers, and then only recently in a conversation realized I was wrong about the ending so they’re back on the reading list. Not quite, but a bit like the captive prince situation.
Anyway, I don’t know what I added or didn’t add to the conservation, but it was nice to reflect on it a bit.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-07 12:41 pm (UTC)I hadn't thought about it either before writing this post! It just hit me mid-writing that actually, that's a valid concern.
I have a deep hatred of DRM, which is why I break the DRM in all the ebooks I buy. Fuck the legality of it. I bought the book -- I refuse to think of it as buying access to the book, especially given that ebook stores do their very best to obfuscate that issue -- and so I want to read it on any device I choose.
ETA: DRM actually has implications beyond just the books themselves. It's the reason I had to switch from Linux back to Windows in, well, 2015 apparently. I couldn't get Adobe Digital Editions to work in Linux, not even in a Windows emulator, and I needed it to be able to download DRM-protected epubs to my computer without having to first route them through my ereader or a mobile device. I could break the DRM and open the epub in Linux, sure, but I needed ADE to get the epub file itself. So, as long as ebooks use DRM and as long as Adobe refuses to make a Linux version of ADE (which means forever), I'm stuck with Windows.
Anyway, I don’t know what I added or didn’t add to the conservation, but it was nice to reflect on it a bit.
Reflection is definitely what I was doing with this post, too. I didn't have any specific thing I wanted to argue or anything I wanted opinions on. I just had some vague thoughts that I thought other bookish people might connect with, and I was right!