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Comment by pistacchio | Hacker News Reader

i got a kindle for xmas. it is amazing. however i've grown up in a house where every wall is covered by a bookshelf full of books. i love owning them, i love the fact that my father and me exchange books and than when i was a kid i could read the very same book that my father read as a child because he saved all of them.

i don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own.

i am against most of the forms of piracy, but frankly i don't like the idea of having to pay for the paper version AND the electronic version of a book. i don't feel it like it's buying two copies of the same book, but more like having to pay for the same book twice because one time you read it on the bus and the other time you read it on the couch. it's the same book whose rights i've already payed once, i think i buy the right of reading like i prefer.

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I grew up in a house almost totally devoid of books. I was completely dependent on libraries until age 18 or so, so books were always the property of the collective. To this day I can't bring myself to write marginalia in my books, the idea is just alien to me.

Perhaps this explains why I cast off physical books so easily. Once I got my kindle I systematically started paring down my library by removing any books that I was able to find electronically. Most of what got culled were mass market and trade paperbacks, and most of what I kept were books that had intrinsic value as objects (library of america, folio, and mid-century modern library editions).

I don't want my children to grow up in a house with no books, so i intend to only read ebook of books i own.

I feel exactly the same, and yet I just bought a Kindle and am very much planning to use it for most of my reading.

How do I resolve this dilemna?

Well, my parents had the same issue, though set up differently. When they fled from Romania after I was born, they had none of the huge library which they had back where they grew up.

So what did they do? They bought books. They bought the kinds of books which they wanted to have sitting on shelves in the house where I grew up, so that I could stumble on them and read them. It worked pretty well.

Most of the best books can be found for cheap in flea-markets. Building a solid library of top quality classics, from Gogol, Dostoievsky, Dumas and Dickens, to Hesse, Mann, Marques and Gary, is not that expensive.

I am extremely annoyed that there is no way to buy and sell used electronic books. It brings me right back to those stupid debates we had in the 90s with RIAA about whether I'm buying a license or an object when I purchase a CD. Then as now, I feel a lot less bad about pirating content when the publishers impose artificial restrictions on what I can and cannot do with things I the stuff I own.

Here's an idea:

Sell physical placeholders that look like books, along with ebooks. You can put the placeholder "book" on your bookshelf to remind you what you own, decorate your room, and give your kids some reading ideas.

The placeholder could come in a variety of smells: musty, smoky, neutral, National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell , and my personal favorite: Earl Grey.

>National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell

This thread is making me nostalgic. I was in the doctor's office with my mother the other day and I actually picked up a copy of National Geographics and sniffed it in the middle of the waiting room. I'll occasionally do it in the supermarket checkout line too. Always reminds me of pulling the first copy I got (Feb 1990) from the Christmas subscription I hounded my mom into buying for me out of its brown paper sleeve.

I don't discount how powerful the emotions elicited by the Proustian recall triggered by tactile interactions with the written word, but I just think the gains far outweigh what we'll lose. The conveniences that dominated the OP don't move me nearly as much as the idea of $10 solar-powered e-readers loaded with the equivalent of entire libraries spreading throughout places like sub-Saharan Africa or rural India (cf. mobile telephones). That kind of stuff gives me a warm fuzzy you wouldn't believe.

Children do what their parents do not what they own.

If you read, your kids will read if you give them encouragement to do so.

This bothers me too, I have a hard time sacrificing all the properties inherent to a ownership of physical book for the one convenience that the kindle offers. Instead I find myself returning to buying books and only using the kindle for reading longer things copy-and-pasted from my computer.

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