By Sheldon Greaves

I am a book addict. I have no desire whatsoever to curtail, restrain, repent, or–God forbid–recover from this delightful bondage. My spouse is likewise blessed; it is not entirely true that I married her for her library.

When I was eleven, I made the conscious decision that I would build a personal library. It was an easy thing to do, since local Friends of the Library book sales offered wonderful stuff at $0.25 for hardbacks and $0.10 for paperbacks. I also volunteered for these sales putting the books out on the table beforehand. No public spirited volunteerism here; this was reconnaissance. When the sale began, I’d head straight to where I had mentally noted the locations of the books I wanted.  A few years working for an antiquarian book dealer in Burlingame, California while I was in grad school introduced me to some of the finer points of books as collectibles, but for me books have never been items of monetary investment. Intellectual investment, definitely! It was the content I was after.

With the advent of used book websites such as abebooks.com, the disease only grows worse, and our friends and neighbors have abetted our habit. I’ve had a couple of occasions where I woke up and gone outside to find boxes of books left on the front porch like some abandoned infant, on someone’s assumption that we would take them in and find homes for them. Which we would. We’ve donated lavishly to local public libraries, private schools, and the occasional homeschooling family who wanted their kids to learn Latin.

And when I say “books,” I mean the real ones. Dead tree media. For years I have had little use for electronic books, especially since that one episode when Amazon confiscated copies of Orwell’s 1984 (I am not making this up) from Kindles over some copyright issue, without letting their customers know about it until it was all over. They promised never to do it again, but I remain jaundiced. Then there is the ease with which such information simply goes away. Then there is the finding from a couple of years ago by a Canadian biologist, who discovered that the shelf-life of electronic scientific data is about 20 years. I believe it; the electronic files for my dissertation are long gone–victims of obsolescence. But my dissertation lives on because there is a copy printed on archival quality paper in the Berkeley library. That stuff will last for centuries. So, please do not call a web site for storing electronic documents an “archive.” It isn’t. Not really. All this marvelous technology and, in the realm of data longevity, we still have not improved on the clay tablet, still readable after as long as 5,000 years.

There is also the aesthetic pleasure of holding a book and reading it. Not to be denied or dismissed. It’s a vital part of the experience.

But, my position has softened, a little. I understand the gains in convenience (mostly) that electronic books bring, and now I have a new dimension to my happy habit. I recently discovered something called forgottenbooks.com, where hundreds of thousands of public domain books are available for downloading and reading. They offer some excellent search tools, although if you want complete versions of the books, you need to sign up. For roughly the price of a Happy Meal each month, you can have unlimited downloads. I succumbed to this temptation and have now downloaded hundreds of books, many of them quite remarkable. There are some amazing things to be found in old books.

I have found, for example, some great stuff on the history of the Mideast, the Ottomans, Mongols, etc. Tons of interesting works on the Arthur legends, minstrelsy of the British Isles, poetry, drama, theology, mathematics, military history… you name it. Speaking of tablets, as I was a little while ago, I located some 19th century editions of a number of important cuneiform texts, which are still used today as standard go-to editions for scholars. These books are long out of print; to use them I would need access to a major university library or a bundle of cash to buy them on the antiquarian book market–assuming there were any to be had. But now I have .pdf copies.

One hugely mitigating factor is that forgottenbooks.com (and an increasing number of other booksellers online) offer the service of making one-off hard-bound copies of these books per request. The prices are pretty reasonable, but my experience thus far is decidedly mixed. I’ve ordered two books so far. One arrived with some damage to the front cover and spine. The other showed up looking like it has lost a wrestling match with an SUV. But even so, those copies will long outlast their electronic brethren.

But, as I said, convenience has it’s siren song. Nearly 600 books, and they all fit in less than 10 GB, which makes them easy to store on my Samsung tablet. I confess I was late to the whole tablet/smart phone game. I was able to make do with my “special needs” phone just fine. I’m glad I waited. We are just about where we need to be for electronic books to be real tools for research. I assume things will continue to get better. But I’m making copious backups, I’m sticking with .pdfs as the format (hopefully) most resistant to obsolescence. If the price becomes low enough, chances are I will make hard copies of as many of them as I see fit.

It’s not really a book unless it can outlast you, which is as it should be.