The End of Private Libraries? | Hacker News Reader

The End of Private Libraries?

robertbreen.com

57 pointspbrowne01176 comments

The author talks about how acquiring books reflects their personal story, time spent, interests etc, and then seems sad and surprised that kids don't want their parents' libraries ... But presumably those kids have their own interests and landmarks of their course through life. I fully expect to keep a handful of my parents personal books that I have specific memories of, but keeping the whole of their libraries feels as pointless as keeping all of their furniture or all of their wardrobes (also things that one can spend a lifetime acquiring and spending time with).

I mean, I might have wanted the furniture I grew up with because of sentimental attachment, but my parents have already overhauled their entire home now that all the kids have left the nest. I care nothing for the new stuff.

Each person's bookshelf reflects their unique journey

Our grandparents, and great grandparents also had libraries of some type. Most of us have none of those books. Books get out dated quickly, we have different interests, etc.

We prefer to keep things our ancestors created (journals, artwork), awarded (military medals), used in a meaningful way or that represent them (photos.) And because space is limited and we technically have a nearly unlimited number of ancestors, we do not keep much.

I have a lot of my dad's old library. His first career was as a philosophy professor, and so it's mostly books too specific for me to sustain an interest in (certainly not that many of them). I have the space, so I've been holding on to them, but I really wish I could ask him (he passed away in 2007) which books were dear to him, and why. As it is, a particular book could have landed on his shelves because he got a good deal on it or something.

This is why I’ve started writing marginalia when I read. It’s a conversation with the future, and an explanation of why you should care about the book. If a reader wants a pristine copy, it’s easy to come by. For the most part. I’m not going to go marking up a rare book, but then I’m not likely to own one either.

One of my most treasured books is a translation of Goethe's _Faust_ which has marginal notes from a nun.

This rings true. I deeply regret not keeping my father's philosophy library, especially his Wittgenstein shelves.

Also by the time a parent dies it's possible those old books are not in great shape. It only takes one mistake for a whole shelf of books to end up damp and musty, and sometimes no one notices how bad it got.

Looking at their bookshelves... That is a decent wall. And remembering that most of it was in the previous house too and I do not remember them ever taking any of them to read again... Yet they are reading new books. And even got rid of some of them. I see no value for me to keep most of them, apart for them looking nice or maybe picking handful of somewhat more interesting books.

Stepping into the library of someone who has passed on can be very personal, and confusing. Who were you, that you have 31 volumes of Reader’s Digest condensed books, shelved next to Josephus, a full matched set of the Waverly novels, a mixed bag of Dorothy Sayers paperbacks, and a nearly complete run of Boy’s Life from 1956-1961? I think the most respectful thing you can do with such a collection is to find people who appreciate parts of it, and pass the books on to them.

It is confusing. My mom had a number of romance novels even though she never struck me as a romantic person. Maybe a phase she had when she was younger? I wish I could have known that version of her, before I was here

I love having a wall of books and the time spent on reading books.

Unluckily I do not have either of those. The never ending competition between society memebers for better position and more stuff to show sucked me in too, making me move for better places to compete others and do things much quicker and doing more things - in unit of time and overall too. All those moves made the collection of my books go way down to be a sad excuse of personal library. It is a short shelf. The same cruel race took time away from reading too. I should have enjoyed life more than participating this stupid and on the end futile race called career. Let others trying to disrupt the f world along pretentious figments. It did not worth it, not at all. What worths to live for is elsewhere. Partly in reading books and having a good personal library.

Well, you have the right to decorate your home however you please, and I am of the view that it should be decorated with objects that are meaningful to you. That can certainly include a shelf or a case of books.

Some years ago I moved to a different continent and the distances being what they were I had to sell off my book collection. This year I resolved to rejuvenate my reading habit, which had decayed since phones and social media were introduced into my life (along with my attention span).

I decided that for the remainder of my life I would buy one quality hardcover book per year as a birthday gift to myself. I read ebooks, they have their merits, but there are books which are truly exceptional works and which have had a profound impact on my life, which I will undoubtedly benefit from re-reading over the years. It feels entirely appropriate for these books to be displayed prominently in my home as reminders of who I am, how I got here, and to always be at my fingertips in case I want to reference them. There will be some sort of meaningful memory, achievement or milestone associated with each one of those books. For all the rest, there's Kindle.

> I would buy one quality hardcover book per year as a birthday gift to myself

Care to give an example? I assume that by quality you mean both quality construction of the book itself as well as quality content printed on the page?

it doesn't really matter, does it? its whatever they consider quality. You would use your own definition if you wanted to do the same. I collect certain kinds of art books, and fantasy novels. If you liked something else, like computer science academic books, you could collect those. It's up to your own definition and style.

Does it matter? No, it really doesn't. I'm just curious, as someone who has a few hundred books sitting around the house, plus another 20-50 checked out from the library at any one time.

I don't know that I'd consider much of any books I own to be "quality". But the house I have does have a fairly nice built-in bookshelf that could probably hold 500 books all by itself. Someday I'll fill it, maybe? With mass-market paperbacks and hardbacks? "Quality" books? Who knows!

It's a personal judgement. What you find quality and what I find quality is likely very different, so asking them to justify that their books are quality seems to be some sort of pedantic attack.

This post is a bit dramatic. My wife and I have 1-2k books. We know multiple people who have such libraries. I don't think they're going anywhere. And this is even though I have a Kindle.

Agreed. The sale of physical books is as healthy as it ever was. There is no reason to think that private libraries are a thing of the past.

All people are going somewhere. As he writes: "this library and I might share the same dissolution". What you and your wife are doing today isn't evidence against his point. The question is what happens to those books after you die.

I recently did a cross-country move and did some pruning of my books. In thinking about what to keep, I realized that as far as practical considerations go, I could have just scanned the bar codes, made a list, and gotten electronic editions of anything if I ever needed to read it again. I instead kept most of them, but for entirely non-practical reasons.

I think people born today just aren't going to have the same emotional connection to physical books. For me, growing up in an age of information scarcity, they were a gateway to wonders. And even now, like the author, they're a reminder of where I've been, a map to the interior of my head. But I'd be wildly surprised if my teen relatives, many of whom are avid readers, ever built up libraries large enough to be cumbersome.

So when I kick off, I fully expect that my treasured books will be scattered to the winds. If I'm lucky a few will be taken as keepsakes. But as a library, I expect it will die with me.

Books are not going away. My kids devour books just like I did when I was a kid. Books can be lent, gifted, borrowed. Books can be discovered in physical places, in the school library, the public library, in a bookstore.

Ebooks just aren't the same.

All of my kids have received Kobo ereaders when they became proficient at reading. Kobo is owned by the same company as Overdrive, which is our library's e-lending platform, so they can easily check out books themselves.

Each of the kids got their ereader when they were 6-7 years old. Now:

- 13-year-old mostly reads sports news on his phone

- 11-year-old mostly reads paper books, occasionally ebooks on his phone

- 9-year-old can't find her ereader, reads tons of paper books

- 6-year-old just got her ereader and is devouring books on it (which is always the reaction when they first get it)

I'm not saying they're the same. And I am sure some kids favor physical books. But the question for me is the extent to which any of them will spend a lot of effort building and hauling around personal libraries when the digital equivalents are always available. And when it's easy enough to get another paper copy if you're willing to wait a few days.

Some will, I'm sure, the way that some people born after CDs and digital music collect vinyl. But personally I'd guess it'll be a similarly niche interest, just another collector's hobby.

My one weird trick - for those you look at second-hand bookstores.

If I see a book I already own that I love, then I buy another copy. Then I can give it away later to someone who I think will appreciate it.

I try not to lend out my favorite books because it is too much trouble to track where they went. Although most people mean well, books don't always boomerang.

My son, 4 years old, himself has > 100 books. So at least some people born today will have a connection to physical books!

I don't disagree that this is probably getting less popular, since of course physical copies used to be the only way to consume them.

> as a library, I expect it will die with me

Yes, I think that is completely true. Why wouldn't it be? I think libraries have always held most value to the collectors themselves. I have a few rare books, but most of the value of my library is personal.

> My son, 4 years old, himself has > 100 books. So at least some people born today will have a connection to physical books!

And people have surely given him lots of stuffed animals too, but it's the rare adult who hauls around a significant collection of them.

> I think libraries have always held most value to the collectors themselves.

In recent years, sure, where books are an affordable and ultimately disposable consumer entertainment. Especially now that you can easily get a used copy of almost any book easily and cheaply. But that's a pretty small slice of "always".

The lament of collecting something of great personal value, which is of value to no one else, reminds me of my photo collection: over 100,000 photos taken over decades, which I absolutely cherish, that are completely worthless to anyone but me, or the people contained within them (who I have usually already shared the relevant photos with). Perhaps it's no accident that the common term for a personal collection of photos is a photo library.

You never know. When an old neighbour passed away his kids gave us his prized collection of photographic slides. Images he had taken over course of 30+ years as a construction engineer working all over the world.

Those were beautiful images of countries that do not exist anymore, at some point we realised that he had spent a lot of time building underground concrete structures in the Middle East and handed the images over to a nice gentile man at the local military base.

Maybe they were useful maybe not, but at least they were looked at again.

For folks clearing out the parents' library, consider a donation to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt (yes, the one built to replace the famous one of old). But before that, figure out how to collect, accumulate, & ship books to the library in a way that is sufficiently low cost, somehow funded by donors, and in a way that tbe library signals a priori that it is willing to sift through on-site (and for which it signals it exert influence on the import authorities). b/c despite its symbolic imoortabce, the library has a lot of empty shelfspace now two+ decades after its opening.

What the new library has in spades is prodigious fire-suppression technologies, so choose books you feel deserve special preservation into posterity.

Good riddance to this kind of library. His relationship with his private library is the same as most people's: an outlet for comfortable consumerism, materialism, and nostalgia.

What he needed was an antilibrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilibrary

The mysterious unread tomes of an antilibrary taunt you and beckon to be read, but not necessarily re-read. The untrodden path holds more adventure than the beaten one, where the treasure has already been claimed. Books in an antilibrary are quests filling up your log, the rewards of yet unknown, possibly great.

I wish more people gave their books away slowly during their lives, instead of all at once upon their death. It's a much nicer way to inherit them and it lets you share the experience with the inheritors.

I think that's fairly commonplace. Books just enter the library even faster. Reversing the flow direction might be challenging, since most people who know when they're going to die don't usually have much time to get their affairs in order.

Private libraries are the privilege of those who do not move frequently, or at all. A large library is surprisingly heavy and bulky to move, and each time you move you will be tempted to leave something behind. If the odds of leaving it behind are even 5% then over time the odds approach 100%. That said, the physical copy of a book has its own story, the dog-eared pages and cracked spines, the occasional stain. I personally somehow find myself remembering which side of a book something was on, and roughly how far through. Very handy since it reduces the search space immediately by 2, at least. And of course, you get all the benefits of messy, imprecise search - the joy of finding something new. Plus you can easily lend them or give them away, and they can't be remotely deleted.

The OP writes as if ebooks and paper books (and audio books!) live in perfect zero-sum disharmony. It seems like most inventions have this effect on discourse. This is more a comment on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle than anything. In this case, I think large paper libraries will tend to dwindle, but not disappear. Much like how accurate music recording and playback caused live music to dwindle, but not disappear, etc.

Moving is exactly how my wall of books went down to a device full of books.

As much as I cherished those books when I first read them, many never made it to a second reading. And the feelings the physical books evoked has faded over years. So they were donated to a library, so that another person may build their own memories and feelings.

Plus, I'd be up to three walls now with all the books I have on my device, let alone those I've read on KU.

Having moved a ton of books multiple times, they are definitely bad. But not nearly as bad as records, where boxes that fit well are expensive, and you have to worry about them getting damaged whether from heat or pressure!

Books are like candles, an obsolete technology that we will keep around forever because they look nice and they are good in a power cut (or in the bath)

I used to buy lots and lots of physical books.

When I had a child though it forced me to downsize since the bedroom with four bookshelves became a kids room. I had to reckon with ‘Why am I holding on to this specific book?’ and in many cases I just couldn’t answer that question. Now I’m very picky about what I do acquire because I don’t have the space to expand much without pushing other things out.

I can't wait till there are physical books that will let you:

1. Find words almost straight away.

2. Change the font and its size.

3. Change the line spacing.

4. Scroll and use the top of the screen to keep track of where you are so you don't skip lines.

5. Have hyperlinks to footnotes. (Edit: I meant endnotes.)

6. Have bookmarks with labels that don't affect the reading experience.

7. Jump to chapters immediately.

8. Hold it the same way, no matter where you are in the book.

9. Read it discretely.

10. Don't need external light 11. Always only take up the space of a very thin book no matter how many you bring

I have a lot of sentimental feelings for my physical books, but they are just so inconvenient. Sadly, for this reason I only buy reference books in print. I even repurchase books I was gifted physically, as ebooks to actually read them.

By way of contrast, I want an e-reader which:

- will allow organizing the books _exactly_ was I want (why isn't by percentage read an option, or chronological by date of publication, or timeframe covered)

- allow flipping through pages of a text quickly with a re-draw/re-fresh rate which actually allows reading individual words as I turn pages quickly searching for a specific passage

- allow for a high-quality, detailed reproduction of an image, either in incredibly high resolution with subtle details (like to a printing of a b/w engraving with two black plates) or in full colour (and for extended colour range there was Hexachrome which I wish had become more popular)

- have the same contrast as a piece of paper w/ bright white paper under UV light, or even a Kelmscott Press edition (which has the blackest ink I've ever seen)

- allow _beautiful_ typesetting and will not allow widows and orphans and stacks to occur (in a re-flowable format --- no fair claiming PDFs are ebooks when folks sneer at them as not being ebooks, or presenting a collection of pixel images in a wrapper as an ebook)

Bonus points if the text is actually correct --- I've never read an ebook in which I did not report at least one typo (and that includes _Dune_ ("pogrom" was rendered as "program" and there was an error in the formatting of a glossary entry in the edition which I re-read) --- that said, the ability to directly report errors is nice, and fai r easier than tracking down the editor of a given volume at a given publisher (which reminds me, I need to check for an updated copy of _The Fall of Arthur_ by J.R.R. Tolkien to see if the typo I reported has been corrected).

The world would be a better place if authors would take typos as seriously as Donald E. Knuth does and give out reward checks (I have a physical one for $2.88 for his _Digital Typography_ --- and need to find a typo in a more recent work so as to have an account at the Bank of the Island of San Serriffe).

Being fair, I've never found a paper book without at least one typo either. Hell, I accidentally bought a paperback on sale that had the last 100 pages replaced with another copy of the previous 100 pages.

Printed books, esp. older ones had a lot more constraints (print deadline) and don't have the same ability to update the master copy and push the corrections out --- there isn't an excuse for a book which has been continuously in print since 1965 still having a typo in it decades after it was first released as an ebook.

In my experience print editors are far more receptive of being informed of errors than ebook editors --- often an ebook seems not to have had an editor at all, certainly no one proofread the copy of _Space Cadet_ I bought on the Sony ebook store for my Sony PRS-505 --- it was so rife with errors as to be unreadable, and required that I borrow a print edition from a local library so as to be able to send in the corrections.

I agree with your points; ebooks are not perfect. Thank goodness the flaws you've listed can be fixed.

Not fixed yet.

The typesetting issue (no orphans, widows, or stacks) in particular is quite intractable (Knuth wasn't able to come up with a hyphenation algorithm which detects and prevents stacks, see the 2nd edition of _The LaTeX Companion_).

It would also be nice to able to buy the next book in a series without going to a store or waiting for it to be delivered.

5: hyperlinks to footnotes are the worst, you have a tiny, tiny little target to tap that might be inside the much larger area of space which will turn the page when tapped, and usually they are actually to endnotes rather than footnotes - footnotes are at the bottom of the page they are referred to upon, rather than halfway across the book at the end of the chapter.

A real footnote sits at the bottom of the page and is visible the moment you turn the page, alerting you for the tiny little sign pointing to it somewhere in the text.

9: you can steal the dust jacket from a similarly sized book and cover up the fact that you are reading Fannie’s First Gape or whatever else you’re embarrassed about, y’know; hell, you could even rip the cover off entirely if it’s a paperback and you don’t care about the book’s condition.

9. It's not about being embarrassed. I just don't need discussions about the book that I'm reading or even about the fact that I am reading a book at all.

Books are similar to other collectables. I inherited my late father's stamp collection recently. He spent a lifetime carefully searching for certain ones and picking others up from shows, the post office, or the Internet.

I don't think I could ever find enough mail I wanted to send to use up even a 100th of them. I collected a few when I was a kid, but never caught the bug like he did.

It seems a shame to throw them out or sell them for pennies on the dollar, knowing how much time and money he spent on them; but that is what will probably happen. I will keep a few in a binder or two for sentimental reasons. They made him happy so they served their purpose.

Head over to r/bookshelfdetective and you'll see a bunch of folks hyped to share their libraries with the world. Maybe such folk are a dwindling but more vocal crowd. Maybe not.

Numbers aside, this line makes me think OP is missing the point:

> I bought the book because I like having a visual, tangible record of the time this book and I spent together. I like scanning my shelves and seeing proof of a rich reading life.

If this is why you have books (I've heard them called "audiobook-trophies" or "kindle-trophies"), you're missing out on what a library can do for you. A library kept in OP's way shows how many books he's got through. What matters his how many books get through him. The proof of a good reading life is inside you. It's not furniture for your living room.

What is a good library then if not a trophy case? It's got books that you go back to again and again. It's got books you've not read yet but whose spines reminds you of gaps in what you know. It's aimed at the long-term, a collection of pages whose text will never reflow or get a pushed update. It's markings won't change, letting you have a talk with your older self.

I have many audiobooks and ebooks, and they're better at some things than physical books. Still, what a hard drive can't do what a personal library can.

I think there are as many opinions on what makes a good library as there are people. There isn’t just one answer.

Just make sure you know what it is for you and don't mess with someone else's. My sister in law and wife organized my bookshelf by color and size ones - it looks much better than way I'll admit, but now fiction and non fiction are mixed, and sets of books are not together, and so for what I care about it was worse.

Good point. It seems the question is what are they trying to accomplish with the library?

OP knows what he's trying to do (remind himself of past books and evidence of reading life), and yet he feels disenchanted if I read the tone right. If that's the case it's a tacit admission that he _wanted_ the wrong thing and could learn to want something better.

That's not a big deal, part of growing is learning to like the things that bring you the most fulfillment. I can't tell him what's best, all I can tell him is what I think is more likely to bring fulfillment and my reasoning.

I'd love to hear other opinions on what's good and why.

I thought the title meant "the era of private libraries is over", but it's really about "the end-of-life of my private library". As a physical book lover, I empathize.

Many years in the future, after global warming wrecks our world, when humanity rebuilds civilization, they will be glad for folks like this person. Without physical books there will be no way to reconstruct our time and tell our story. Digital media will be useless to future generations if there’s a blip in continuity.

Surviving artifacts of our culture and knowledge

> Digital media will be useless to future generations if there’s a blip in continuity.

If anything, this undersells it: plenty of not-very-old digital media is useless today with no blip in continuity, either because of bit rot or, more commonly, because of perfectly good data in a format for which there don't exist readers any more.

Don't forget too that it is some form of subscription and the owners decided not to continue keeping that in your subscription.

That's true; there are a lot of reasons not to rely passively on digital media for archival purposes. But I'm speaking here even of digital media from the lost, pre-cloud, pre-SAAS age when one could loosely presume to own at least what was on one's computer, but (therefore?) there was no institutional interest in keeping the large variety of media readable. (For example, I joined the Mac ecosystem not long after they switched away from SITX compression, and almost immediately it became--at least for a new user--impossible to find uncompressors.)

My personal library has grown massively in the last few years. I have a few rooms with the walls covered with textbooks and deluxe/limited editions of classic works. They're very comforting to look at, at least when I'm not stepping over piles of books in the floor.

I have a 2k epub collection.

My bookworm friends claim it's not a "real" private library

> I have a 2k epub collection.

> My bookworm friends claim it's not a "real" private private library

As long as it's in an un-DRM'd format where your access to it doesn't require anyone else's permission, it's a real private library. Who cares what anyone else thinks?

That is one concern I have about a similar collection of Kindle titles --- I'm hoping that having access to the associated e-mail account (the password is on a slip of paper in an envelope in the safe) will allow my son on-going access when I pass away.

Your friends are just poking fun, of course it's a real library. I also have a large number of ebooks (in addition to a 1-2k book physical library) and the ebooks are, paradoxically, less accessible. It's too easy to just download hundreds of books in one go (let's say if you wanted all the original Goosebumps books) and not actually look at them, whereas every physical book has to be obtained and shelved individually. Then ebooks disappear into Calibre where I utterly forget about them, whereas a physical book's presence on the shelf is a constant reminder that it exists and is waiting for me to read it.

The one downside of ebooks is there's no way to donate them to a library. I have a hundred and something books on the kindle that will never be read again.

Although I guess I don't "own" them, I only license them.

I think smaller apartments and lack of storage space might be a driver for buying less books. However, while I do feel modern apartments are smaller, I don't know if this feeling is true.

Huh, I was skeptical but it looks like studios and 1 bedrooms have been getting smaller recently (2 and 3 bedrooms have been getting larger): https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/market-snapshots....

"In general, small rentals are getting smaller and large apartments are gaining square feet. More precisely, two- and three-bedroom apartments have been adding more floor space in the last decade, while studios and one-bedroom apartments (the dominating floorplan among new apartments) have been getting more and more compact."

You probably have tens of thousands of unnecessary documents and other files hoarded on your computers, right? This seems like much the same thing to me, it's just digital now.

This beautifully captures the bittersweet reality of book lovers in a digital age

Nostalgia is a powerful thing

It used to be more powerful. I remember it well...

Sounds like consumerism

I would say this is the exact opposite of consumerism. People find a lot of artistic value and intelligence in the books they acquire. The post articulates beautifully how much connection this man has to his books. He does not regret for a moment for buying them, which is the feeling you have when you buy things you don't need. He looks at them and remembers the experience of reading them. This is beautiful and magical, and I can relate to that.

The acquisition of books is totally decoupled from the "artistic value" and "intelligence" that reading them proffers. I buy books too, rarely at retail but sometimes, and I make no bones that my desire to do so is as consumerist as anything else I purchase.

True.

You will own nothing and be happy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com