fuckyeahreading!

On (e)Reading

savingink:

That’s part of my bookshelf. Non-fiction on top, fiction on the bottom. I took the photo for this awesome project.

Considering so many of my books are still on loan to friends, and the rest in the U.S., it’s a very small fragment of my collection. I have always loved owning stacks and stacks of books, holding on to the ones I’ve read and loved, returning to them like old friends who never really left. And yet, soon this will be a far more realistic view of my bookshelf:

And try as I might, I can’t mourn this new reality. When I first got a Kindle, I thought I would only use it when circumstances demanded, like during flights or when traveling light in general. I knew that stuffing a tiny 213 g device into my carry-on was decidedly preferable to taking the usual 2-3 paperbacks or hardbacks I usually lugged along. And then I started reading everything on it.

Today, I welcome the fact that I have just about every book on my various bookshelves (tracked down through painstaking torrent searches) now in my bag wherever I travel, to be opened and quoted or reread at my whim. I love the fact that I can still get just as absorbed in a story, even without the feel of the crisp pages beneath my fingers, or the physical dog-earing of valuable information. And while I love a beautiful early edition printed on aging stock and smelling like my favorite bookstores, I realize that that’s just window dressing. The story, the information inside is what matters. The medium is just framing, and when I find a medium that works better for my own purposes, when the next time I move (and I do it a lot) I won’t have to find storage for dozens of boxes filled just with books, when I can always take my collection with me and borrow books for free despite being thousands of miles away from an actual library branch, I have no qualms embracing it. This is the future of reading, and I can’t wait.