An Era Passing

It will never be gone, but it is definitely in passage.

You may have noticed in perusing some of the Regular Stops on my bloglist that a number of the folks have been engaged in the exercise of compiling "What is on my book-shelf" lists. Some fascinating collections are revealed as well as insights into the persona behind the blogs.

But it caused me to think about books. I've long had a love of books. I adopted the habit very early of never discarding a book once I'd bought it. After a time in the military however, with frequent moves and looming maximum shipment weight allowances, I finally purged my very obsolete, but hardly read, college textbooks. It was necessary to make space for the many books collected over the years of overseas assignments where there was no television so the evenings were passed with the latest offering from the Stars & Stripes bookstore at the BX.

When we built the house in Texas we had the chance to include a lot of built-in book cases. Some in the living room flanking the fireplace, some in my office adjacent to the work area and some more in the guest bedroom area. They were pretty much all filled up when we moved in and completed the nesting process.

Then SWMBO went off to a one-day course conducted by a friend in town who operates an amazing interior home decorating store. The course convinced my wife to "re-do" the living room book case walls. That led to numerous excursions to various bric-brac, knick-knack, pollywolladoodle shops to acquire a collection of curiosities and gimcracks to fill spaces which should have been occupied by books. A requirement of the decorating was the removal of all of the dust jackets to expose the predominantly black spine bindings of the works. Then very precisely determined by trial and error placement of the acquired artifacts and literature to simulate reckless abandon exactly in conformity with the existing feng shui. Just like we don't have "drapes" we now have "window treatments", so also we don't have "book-cases" we have a decorated wall shelf area.

Now, I can't find a bloody thing when I want to check a reference. The placement is very un-library with concern only for color, size and thickness rather than subject or author.

But, that's when I recognized the era passing. When I pondered whether to create my list of "What's on your bookshelf" I suddenly stopped to ask, "What's a bookshelf?" Followed quickly by, "Who needs one?"

No, I haven't become instantly illiterate. But the era is very clearly in transition. We are seeing the de-emphasis of the traditional book. We don't need to kill trees anymore to "publish" our thoughts and fantasies. We've seen the evolution from scrolls of parchment to tediously hand-illuminated manuscripts to mass production publishing to publish-on-demand. Now we are very aggressively on the road to e-book domination.

I'm on my third generation Kindle. I've commented several times here about how convenient it is and how it has drastically impacted the amount of material I read as well as the quality. SWMBO has her own. Now I've added an iPad which is loaded with the Kindle e-reader app as well as iBooks and a half-dozen news source apps. Recently I discovered Kno, which is a textbook app that offers student from K-through grad school a route to buy or rent text books for a portion of the dead-tree price. Kno lets them eliminate the heavy back-pack, save a bunch of money, search, highlight, bookmark, clip notes and organize all their school books.

Yes there will always be the nostalgic concept of evenings before the fireplace, snow falling softly outside the window, a glass of vintage port by my chair and feel of a good book in my hands. I'll nod appreciatively when someone tells me of the smell of the bindings, the heft of the pages as they turn, the remembrances of readings past, the experience of losing track of time in an antique bookstore or comfortable library. Yep, but within arm's reach will be my Kindle or iPad or next generation equivalent with thousands of books at my fingertips and information it would take me weeks to find the old fashioned way.

And since I'm not going to drive a windmill powered "green" car or power my household with rechargeable batteries and solar cells, at least I'll save a few trees.