.
| Hearsay: |
Well, you’re going to have to. I kind of actually like how he divides up this one when talking about what we’ll lose as the private library disappears from our homes.
The architecture of our lives is constantly changing, and the library may be next on the list of rooms that grow vestigial and then vanish from our floor plans. Where it survives, it has merged with the “office” or the “den,” and the language of the contemporary home, which stresses flow and openness, doesn’t bode well for the survival of a room that should stand apart, a quiet eddy to the side of the busy torrent of modern life. The library, alas, may go the way of the separate dining room and the formal parlor, not because we won’t read anymore, but because we won’t read books anymore, at least not books printed on paper.
But what a loss to the ways books represent, bedevil and impeach us. They represent us, of course, as anyone knows who has made basic decisions about which books go in the living room and which get confined to less public places. That they bedevil us is clear if you have moved recently or live burdened with closets filled with books — books under the bed, books in the attic — or if you have ever saved a book for years or decades only to discover, upon desperately needing it, that it has been lost in the general deluge of too many books.
But they also impeach us, and it is that function that electronic readers can never replicate. A wall of books is mortality made geometric, a pattern of hope and loss, ambition and failure.
January 2006
December
2005
November
2005
October
2005
September
2005
August
2005
July
2005
June
2005
May
2005
April
2005
March
2005
February
2005
January
2005
December
2004
November
2004
October
2004
September
2004
August
2004
July
2004
June
2004
May
2004
April
2004
March
2004
February
2004
January
2004
December
2003
November
2003
October
2003
September
2003
August
2003
Bookninja © Copyright
The opinions expressed on this site are those of individual participants
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the site owners,
organizers, or other participants.
[powered by WordPress.]
August 16th, 2010 at 9:36 pm
Never mind the personal library. Why is no one terrified of ebooks destroying the public library system that so many of us depend on? I can’t afford to pay every time I want to read the latest Anthony Beevor hardcover!
August 17th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Why would the private library disappear? Books, unlike CDs, LPs, and 8 track tapes are a human-readable medium. They won’t become obsolete because something else came along.
Are people going to throw out all their books all of a sudden? Are people going to quit buying used books? Are collectors going to quit collecting?
August 17th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Andrew, not a chance. I agree with you. Physical books will be made and read long after I am dead.
August 17th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
I keep hearing about how e-readers are changing publishing, but I hardly ever see anyone reading one.
Might this be due to the role other gadgets (noisy ipods, cell phones and apps) have played in ruining public space for readers? All the more reason, I would say, to resist the gadgetization of books.
But even if that were the case, it would mean that an emerging majority of readers is sitting at home clicking away on little bits of plastic. That doesn’t feel real to me either.
(However, I admit I just recommended e-readers to my father, as his eyes are deteriorating and the selection of large print books available is poor).