My old person trait is that I think 'ghosting' is completely unacceptable and you owe the other person a face-to-face conversation.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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I love physical books, but I love eReaders more. I've loved digital books since before digital books existed.
My love for digital books started when I was in college, and was lugging around a backpack full of fucking heavy dead trees. I spent countless hours fantasizing about a future where I could carry my entire library around in a single, small device.
You often see the lament: "it's the future! Where's my flying car‽" But, my friend, we are living in the future, one where my most cherished desire - the ability to literally fit every book I own into a single portable device - has come true.
I even have a second device, the dimensions of a standard US sheet of paper, on which I can write and easily read PDFs formatted for print; I can even run OCR on the notes and get pretty good results - this eliminated the endless, unsearchable notebooks that were my second plague. One day, this device will be foldable, and I'll be able to combine the two uses into one device.
I do still own, and occasionally buy, paper books. When I do, they're books I've already greatly enjoyed, and want to have hard-bound copies of. I curtail this behavior, as I've moved home a dozen times in my life already, and each time culled large portions of my library. For years, nobody accepts paper books, and they mostly go to recycling, which I always fine painful. It's one of the worst parts of moving, choosing either to haul around more heavy boxes or send less cherished books to be destroyed. The books I do buy are destined for the bookshelf; I buy these only for nostalgia, and it is unlikely that their spines will ever be broken.
My true love is e-ink; my library exists both on my computer (backed up) and on my eReader, always and fully accessible whether at home or travelling, and never taking up more space than a notepad. I had moved on long before the means to move on were available, and have never looked back.
If you're in the UK, next-time you're forced to do a cull, try to see if you can find (or just start) a Bookcycle/Shelfcycle nearby. There aren't many yet but they're growing. It's a charity explicitly designed to do a better job of valuing donated books than existing infrastructure. They worked out that places like schools in developing worlds can often make great use of the books that other charity shops would destroy because they don't sell quickly in UK charity book shops. So Bookcycle sells the ones that would to raise funds to send the ones that wouldn't as a donation to communities that would value them. They try really hard not to destroy any book that someone might still find value in somewhere.
Great suggestion, thanks! I'm personally i the US, but next time I need to purge my bookshelves, I'll look for a similar program here.