The shelf thing annoys me greatly, but I don't want paper copies for the most part - I'm on a clearing-out-the-house spree, digitizing everything.
But I'm concerned about what that does both for my relation to the media, and how it will change how my son gets introduced to things. So many of the ways I got introduced to books and music etc. was via what my parents had on the shelves or left out, or the radio the played etc.
I think this is part of a huge societal change we don't talk enough about: Our exposure is changing dramatically. E.g. we play much less music out loud at home than my parents did, because most of my music listening is with earphones from my phone during my commute. While we have quite a few books out (which I'm ironically, given my concern, quickly changing), most of what I read is never "visible" to my son unless/until he hacks my laptop.
I wrote a long piece about it on my blog a couple of weeks back: http://www.hokstad.com/the-hidden-library
It's not just for my son either - I find that I feel I have a different relationship to books that are out on the shelf: I get constant reminders about them, and refresh my memory, and will often flip through on or etc., while I've found myself even forgetting books I was right in the middle of on my Kindle app because it's not visible unless I pick up a device and start the app and look for it.
I've started thinking about what I want to do to address it, and one approach I want to play with is picture frames - exposing "content as art" in the form of jacket covers from books, albums etc. automatically on a few digital photo frames around the house, coupled with organizing a full "family library".