[Discussion] Thoughts on owning books

[anehan]

Crossposted 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.

Comments

[olivermoss]

I love owning books, but honestly reading a paper book is hard on my body, especially since my shoulder injury.

I love my kindle. I love having stuff there and I don't need to worry about move them or dusting them. But, if I really love a book I get a paper copy. I am old enough that I've dealt with a lot of format obsolescence problems. I also worry about companies complying in advance to political pressure. Automatic updates, writers changing words, etc, also worries me. Some writers are open about correcting typos and other updates, but I think there are also more nefarious changes at times.

I really, really love my ebooks but I am aware that buying so much in ebooks could wind up biting me in the butt.

[anehan]

I just commented above on the accessibility issue! :D A book stand helps a lot with reading paper books, but it still isn't nearly as easy as just reading an ebook.

Some writers are open about correcting typos and other updates, but I think there are also more nefarious changes at times.

Yes! Though that is admittedly also something of a concern in physical books as well. See: Georgette Heyer's estate removing the anti-semitism in The Grand Sophy and not indicating that they'd done so.

[azurelunatic]

So one of the things I occasionally do for my friends is a "remove this thing that you can't even with", in computer textual book form. And I always make sure they have the full book on hand somehow, so my edit isn't the only version they have. It's the not indicating that's the deepest problem.

(The most notable occasion was a friend who wanted to read the book where a beloved long-running character died. A character whose perspective on life they referred to in the same way they'd have taken a father's advice. While there was foreshadowing throughout the book, only the last two chapters dealt with the death, and of those, only the last few paragraphs of the penultimate chapter. So I carefully snipped the file and sent both copies along.)

[anehan]

Yes, nothing wrong with removing bits from books! I don't see why anyone would need to subject themselves to something they very much don't want to see just for authenticity's sake, as long as it's known that bits have been removed and the original survives. Sneaky revisionism, especially to scrub some author's reputation, is not okay, though.

[olivermoss]

Yup, stealth updates can be a real problem. I was in a college class once with paper books that appeared to be the same edition, but they were different versions of the text. One had been de-gayed. Half the class was confused and a little upset why we'd read the book for class and the other half was like 'did you just skim it?'

[anehan]

Wow. That's hilarious and also deeply disturbing. Do you happen to remember which book it was?

[olivermoss]

The City and The Pillar by Gore Vidal. I tried to buy a de-gayed copy from a fellow student, but none would sell as they thought it weird that I wanted one. If I was able to get one, I'd have the copies with the same cover art and near identical title pages on my shelf and bookmarked. I wanted that so bad, but alas.

[anehan]

Now that would have been epically cool.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, they'd be both a citeable example and a neat display