Hacker News Reader

Comment by keerthiko | Hacker News Reader

I think it was in the mid-to-late 90s as the internet was just becoming more available to lower income groups.

"Nobody buys physical encyclopedias anymore, everything else is going to go that way soon too"

In high school debated on the side of the demise of books (2002) and I won. Back then I convinced myself of my side for the sake of my debate performance, but I'm pretty sure today that books are going nowhere in a hurry.

View on HN

This is true. When eBooks started becoming big, my wife threw out all of her books figuring that electronic was the future.

She really regrets doing that.

I don't. Unless you see a value of collecting them, having a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a book means nothing if you can access that content next time in any format. The only argument to that is that you like to collect that particular edition because of the artwork, paper, etc. Outside that, there I cannot find any other logical argument.

She threw out books? Do you mean literally in the trash or sold them to a book store?

I moved country and had to make decisions about which of our books were valuable. In the end our criteria came down to ‘would we read it again’, ‘is it a nice edition’ and ’does the physical book have a special memory’. That meant that we gave away probably half of the books. You can always buy or download them again in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com