Lending Libraries, Downloads and Bookshelves

Am I the only reader who now has more recently-read e-books in their Calibre catalog (or Kindle + iBooks) than they have recently-read paper-books?

I buy novels in paperback, since I think fiction writers and publishers need supporting and I prefer to read fiction on paper. Also because my local bookshop is Foyles. I download academic books, since academic publishing is a swindle on the public and the academics are not making a living from their textbooks on differential geometry. Best-selling pop-culture authors are also quite rich enough without needing me to trigger another 50p in royalties. I accept these are beliefs that fit my needs. Like I’m the only person who does that.

In the past there were things called Public Libraries, and there was one on your high street. It might not have the book you wanted on your shelves, but it could order that book from a library that did. The weekly visit to the library to get a couple of books to read was as fixed an occasion as the weekly shop or cleaning the bicycle chain. (You never cleaned your bicycle chain? What kind of person are you?) A lot of the books I read were from the public library, or from the Senate House Library which I could use as a graduate of the University of London.

It’s been a long time since I went into my local lending library, and it wasn’t very good back then. The academic books I want are postgraduate mathematics and philosophy textbooks and I have a feeling no-one would be able to get a copy of Jean-Pierre Serre’s Local Fields from a regular suburban lending library.

So the website I get my academic books from is like the local Lending Library, except of course authors don’t get royalties from it. But then they didn’t get a lot from Lending Libraries as I remember. Maybe a bit more than musicians do from Spotify, and certainly more than a £0.00 Kindle, but a writer who was more borrowed than bought back in the day needed to be frugal with the gas central heating.

And I have donated to Philip Tagg, author of Everyday Tonality. I’m going to write about that at some stage. If you want hardcore music theory, that’s your book. Because, you know, you’ve already read Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony. Right?

If you don’t have Calibre, you should definitely look into it.

About once a year I clear out books I realise I am never going to read again. Many of those are pop-culture best-sellers. Some are novels, and a few are academic books. So my limited bookshelf space doesn’t have a history of what I have read, but of what I have read that I think is worth keeping. The last clear-out was of books that made me think why did I buy that exactly?. I felt much better when I cleared those sources of regret off the shelves and away from my eyes. And if I’m prepared to do that to books, you can only imagine what I’m prepared to do with people. But I digress.

The bookshelf was the thing that spoke about you to yourself (I am he who has read all this), and to others (Jesus Christ, Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony?). But now part of me is hidden on my iPad or Calibre library. I don’t use Kindle as much, but when I do,I’m always surprised at how much I’ve read on it. Because it’s not there to remind me.