And Another Thing

What is “the library” now and what is it it going to become as the market for the e-reader grows?

Right now, the Oxford English Dictionary describes a library as this: “A building or room containing collections of books, periodicals, and sometimes films and recorded music for people to read, borrow, or refer to.”

At my house, where live two avid readers, my father and I have combined our book collections in order to fill up a single room in the house with our literature. This, we call our “library,” and it is a source of great pride for us. First of all, the mere fact that we have it, that there is a room in our house dedicated just to the holding of books, serve as some testament to our love of literature. Second, it is a great feeling to be able to survey the vast number of books we have collected and to note the number of “classics” we have acquired. There are a fair number of these,The Great Gatsby being one, which we own in triplicate or quadruplicate between the two of us. Our library has become somewhat of a biography; books my dad got in college stand next to ones I purchased with my allowance as a little girl, books from our short-lived religious phase stand in one corner, books about war from my father’s first days in the Marine Corps stand in another. The library is something we like to show off, let guests peruse, perhaps even pull a book or two off the shelf that they would like to read. We like the way the books stand on the shelf and we have arranged them to be visually appealing. The library being the first room one sees upon entering the house, it has become a representation for our entire family.

Will the personal library be the first thing to go with the e-reader? How many people will still desire to keep physical copies of their books when their collections don’t take up even a shelf, much less an entire room?

It seems sort of like a problem akin to the “books without covers” dilemma discussed in the New York Times article posted here. With book collections stored in a computer, how will we show off what we have collected? How will we let others see the things we have discovered in literature?

Maybe, as others here have suggested, books will become a collectible item, and the personal library will not die out but will instead become like any other collection of old and vintage things -- things not to be touched or read but admired and handled delicately, valuable because of their age and irrelevancy.

And what of the bookstore? The bookstore, while not on the “free” level of the public level, certainly fits the dictionary definition of one. It’s been addressed before how the convenience of the e-bookstore is going to be game-changing. And Amazon has been doing it digitally for years; difference is, until recently when you purchased a book online, it was actually mailed to you in all its papery glory. Once the book is an entirely digital format (and I don’t have much doubt that soon it will happen across the board), are mega-bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders going to go out of business? Or will they make the switch and go into competition against Amazon and the Kindle? Barnes & Noble has already taken steps with the Nook, which they are trying to sell by appealing to our sense of brand loyalty. (A tactic that will probably work; for many, including myself, Barnes & Noble is a source of many childhood memories.)

Shopping for books will undoubtedly become much simpler with the e-reader, it has that to be said for it. Instead of going to the bookstore and picking out a book almost at random, people will be able to see personalized recommendations based on what they have purchased before. There will be no kneeling, pacing, or cranking of the head to read spines necessary; the books on the bottom shelf will get purchased just as much as those at eye level. Not only that, but the distinguishing between hard- and soft-cover books will be gone; each individual book, except special editions and the like, will be sold at equal price no matter which copy you buy. It might be a nice change, though admittedly I will personally be a little frustrated as an avid collector of hardcovers.

People keep talking about how books won’t go as easily as our other dead media has, but think of the letter. The letter went out with an enormous fight because people simply didn’t see email as a personal or meaningful method of communicating with loved ones. It was years before personal emailings came into wide use. But still, they did, and now the only mail we get are bills and magazines.

I guess what I’m really asking is this: how long is it going to be before the Oxford English Dictionary removes the words “building” and “room” from their definition of “library”? Will we ever move completely from the physical into the digital?