Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

I’ve spent most of my life in and around books. I worked in bookstores, I wrote novels and short stories (mostly unpublished), I studied literature in school, and I went into a line of work that involves a lot of reading and writing. For years I’ve read compulsively, helplessly, and joyfully and I’ve never, ever deliberately parted with a book. The problem with that kind of life means that before you know it you’re swimming in books and are on track to die a bibliomaniac’s death, like Al-Jahiz, buried under a toppled pile of books. I suppose there are worse ways to go.

Over the years, I’ve been accused of being a hoarder (or worse, a materialist) for keeping so many books. And I would launch into the usual explanations that book-lovers throw out about the joys of re-reading, the need for reference, the library as a catalog of the furniture of the mind, the great necromantic conversation with the dead that a private library represents, etc.

While I’ll confess to a certain love for the smell and feel of books, it was never really about the books so much as access to the words and pictures in the books. I refused to let anything go, no matter how spurious or mundane because I never knew when it might be useful, and each one represented a moment in my own life and thinking that I wanted to remember (I never really used to keep a journal, just marginal notes in other people’s books).

But it became clear to me that I needed a new solution.

In what is probably a familiar experience to book-people, I had run out of space. I was preparing to buy another shelf, but I already had eight six-foot shelves, and a half-dozen three-footers tucked into every available corner. I had no more space for shelves without setting up library stacks or moveable shelving. I did an inventory and realized I had close to 2000 books, some of which I had been moving around creation with me for the better part of 20 years. So I began strategizing, and wondered if electronic books could be a potential solution.

The problems with e-books are manifold: they’re expensive (in many cases more expensive than a physical copy); they obliterate internal page structures like parallel columns, footnotes, and other apparatus criticus; they’re often missing illustrations that were present in the print versions; they are rife with misprints and errors not present in the hard copy; and they’re almost universally afflicted with Digital Rights Management locks that restrict access. While each of those doesn’t apply to every e-book, and there are workarounds for some of the issues, when you’re talking about trying to replace a large physical collection they become dealbreakers. Who would invest thousands of dollars for a library of imperfect copies missing elements at random, and potentially locked to some online service? And that’s setting aside the biggest issue of all: more than half of the books I own were not available for purchase in electronic form at any price even if I could reconcile myself to the defects.

So after much rumination and hemming and hawing, I bought a scanner and a used paper-cutter. Though my hand trembled at first, I have been slicing the bindings off of my paperbacks and feeding them through a form-feed scanner. After post-processing to clean them up and perform optical character recognition on them, I have digital reproductions of the books that look like the real thing, contain no additional errors, have no missing illustrations, have no DRM, and are full-text searchable.

I’ll confess I’ve gotten some strange looks from friends and family, but the benefits far outweigh the loss. The smell and textural experience are gone, but that goes both ways. I don’t have to deal with yellow, half-rotten books from before acid-free paper was a thing anymore either.

But the real benefits are in access. I used to carry two or three books in a bag most of the time. Now I keep a cheapo tablet in my bag and can carry all of my books, everywhere I go, all the time. I can make backups, and keep them at a friend’s place or in a storage unit, so if my house burns down, I still have all my books. I use indexing software so I can search them all at once; if I forget where I read something instead of spending an hour flipping pages, I can type a sentence and find out in seconds. In some cases the scans are actually more legible than the old paperbacks were in print. As an added bonus, my marginalia are even preserved intact.

When I was a child watching Star Trek, I always wished I could have a little slate that held all the books in the world on it. When I was in school I always wished I could just search my books like I search the internet, or that the quality and depth of information in books was actually available on the internet (it’s definitely not now, and due to perverse copyright extensions it may never be). In short, that part of the Star Trek future is here if you’re brave (or foolish) enough, and I’ve decided to live in it.

It’s time-consuming to do it right, so I do one or two a night before bed and a few more on the weekends. I’ve done two or three hundred, and in another year or so I’ll be done with the paperbacks and I’ll need to make a decision about whether to give the hardbacks the same treatment.

But so far, I have no regrets, only a deepening enthusiasm for the expanding horizons of glorious imperishable access to the words that are meaningful to me.