Book Hoarding

Nice. I have been collecting books since I was about 12 years old, and continue to buy things of interest here and there, though at a much slower pace now being 57 years old. I was very fortunate to have most of what I have ever wanted in my collection, which is one reason that my collecting has mostly stopped, as there are only so many hours in a day. Some day, as my plan has been all along, is to spend a whole lot more of my time reading once I get off the gerbil wheel, if that ever happens. I do know this...my daughter is going to have a pretty nutty book collection when all is said and done...which also brings me some sense of satisfaction. Once they finally do away with printed works, other than in niche publishing markets, which is in the works, actual book collections will be the kinds of things being acquired by those that may want them badly, particularly the more rare variety, i.e, first edition hardcover, limited print runs, and so on. It is a rather long way out, but I do believe there will come a day when some book collections will be very highly sought after. In many ways, with the advent of digital information, books are sadly racing toward greater obscurity, obsolescence, and antiquity. It is only a matter of time, I firmly believe. We are already 1/2 way there...
 
I hope that guy in the video (I only watched part) has a good home security system. Jesus. Warbling about his Stephen King and Joe Hill books to a YouTube audience, seems like pitching chum to the shark nest.


I have maintained that books, printed books, will go away.
I always said the tipping point would be when ebook sales surpassed physical books.
Now, I've changed my mind. It'll happen when people flat out quit reading. And that is occurring at an alarming rate.
For me, the real bellwethers will be when the public libraries begin closing for lack of traffic and support.
 
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"To destroy a culture, you do not have to burn books. You just have to get people to stop reading them. -Ray Bradbury



Truer words were never spoken...
 
Always wondered if it would be pushy and obnoxious to keep changing the subject of ordinary conversation to books you like.

"What did you think of (latest popular film)"

"Oh, I love GK Chesterton and let me tell you how much for ten mintutes!"
 
Zaharoff said:
For me, the real bellwethers will be when the public libraries begin closing for lack of traffic and support.
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Hasn't that been happening in some places since at least the early '90s? I could be wrong, it might have been in the latter part of that decade that I started hearing about libraries being closed down or repurposed into something like "public information hubs" due to lack of demand for the books & reading side of things.

Stephen Jones's intros to some of his Best New Horror anthologies from that period read a little like horror stories themselves. I remember them chiefly as deadpan accounts of the ongoing collapse of book sales and the horrifying transformations of the publishing industry over that period that read like something from a lost Ballard novel. Gloom and doom with an emphasis on the doom, but I often found them bleakly funny in a way.
 
The movement away from a print-based culture has been underway for a long time, and in many ways is a technocratic, totalitarian wet dream. We could talk about all the downsides of such a notion all day long, of course, but rest assured...control of information dissemination is directly connected to the power structure's ability to preserve itself. In many ways it is the ultimate way of controlling information, a la, censorship.
 
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My kindle program is not working right now and I'm in the middle of an amazing book. Thankfully it's a pdf, so I can read it outside the kindle (I'd be tearing my hair out if it was kindle-only) but it does mean a couple of books are trapped and unreadable.

So paper books are more convenient than something I can't even load up. Always take a pdf if you can get it.
 
Robert Adam Gilmour said:
My kindle program is not working right now and I'm in the middle of an amazing book. Thankfully it's a pdf, so I can read it outside the kindle (I'd be tearing my hair out if it was kindle-only) but it does mean a couple of books are trapped and unreadable.
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You might already know this, but you can access your Kindle cloud library on other devices via the Amazon website. After logging in, click on Account & Lists at the top, then choose Content & Devices from the menu.

For a few years recently, I didn't even have a working Kindle and just logged in to Amazon to read ebooks on my laptop screen.
 
Robert Adam Gilmour said:
This is on my laptop and it isn't working.
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So you are using a Kindle app on your laptop? What I'm talking about doesn't use an Amazon app (I've never had the Kindle app on my laptop). Just log in at the Amazon website and you can access your cloud library, without downloading the ebooks. You'll be looking at ebooks directly on the Amazon site (staying logged in there--it may occasionally prompt you to log in again). You'll be reading on whatever browser you use, not reading in a Kindle app.
 
Storage

Could he not store his ebook collection in any cloud storage?
Dropbox - Mega - Sync - iCloud - pCloud - Drive - Google etc ...
Most offer free storage of 5 G (Mega = 20) which is sufficient for a large library.
Then down whenever he wants?
Personally, I would store in several, in case one company goes under.
 
Re: Storage

Zaharoff said:
Could he not store his ebook collection in any cloud storage?
Dropbox - Mega - Sync - iCloud - pCloud - Drive - Google etc ...
Most offer free storage of 5 G (Mega = 20) which is sufficient for a large library.
Then down whenever he wants?
Personally, I would store in several, in case one company goes under.
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Possibly. Not sure about file format/readability--I haven't looked into that. Also, I think it would be necessary to strip out Amazon's DRM to be able to copy the files.

It's a good idea. Sooner or later, I'm going to look into doing that myself. Either cloud storage outside of Amazon or keeping and backing up my own copies outside of any Amazon device or app.
 
I have a pretty massive e-book/e document collection that I acquired through various P2P means back when you could easily get away with it, and once the bandwidth was available to download larger files quickly. So yes...lots of discographies, loads of all manner of books of all types, so on and so forth. Although I do not know the extent of all this content as it is on numerous hard disks and haven't perused much of it in a few years, I will get to it in the future. I always made a point of taking it all off the internet once that era was said and done and having your files available for others to DL was no longer necessary. I have archived copies of my archived copies, and personally, I would never store any of it on any cloud or on the internet at all. At the time most of this material was acquired, there was no "cloud" as we know it today, hence having piles of hard drives that were removed from machines and replaced with empty ones. I just use a toaster to plug them into and access them with ease. Back then, I had built all of my own machines with multiple HHDs primarily for this purpose, and ran them 24 hours a day, downloading, for quite a few years. It was like the wild west at that point in terms of content, whether it was declassified documents, research papers, rare books and archive material that people had actually scanned, and all manner of obscurities. Once everything changed, this practice stopped but I am very glad I was able to grab hundreds of thousands of pages of materials of all kinds. Point is here that I am glad they never got stored in any way other than on my local drives, and that is where they will stay, and in general, I have no interest in anyone knowing what I have or for entities other than myself having access to to all of it.
 
I'm fascinated by other people's book collections or hoards, whichever it is, this thread has been quite interesting to browse through.

I wouldn't call myself a book hoarder quite yet. I've been the type of person to purge items ritually once in a blue moon because I dislike clutter. I've lived in several places over the years that were in such disarray that I've become slightly phobic of not having enough space to move around in. I've gotten rid of my DVD/CD collection, clothes, comics, furniture, misc items that I don't have much use for. There has a been a recent trend in my area of small pop-up libraries. I'm sure it's a common sight in other cities across the US, not sure about other countries however. Usually this is where I'll take books I buy that after awhile I don't think I'll ever get around to reading. I also like to browse myself, small treasures happen to pop up once awhile, such as a edition by Schopenhauer from 1928 and also a first edition copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Unfortunately I sold off the Kerouac for a quick cash exchange some years ago, but overall, rarities or items of interest happen to find there way into these small libraries. My hopes that others with a love of literature will find my books intriguing and that they will find a good home. My other fear but one I don't think on too much is that someone without a home will use them as a fire starter to keep warm. I've seen it happen plenty of times, but I can't blame them too much I guess.

As for my own book collection, I keep it relatively under 500 books. Novels I have an easier time parting with unless I absolutely adore it and know I'll reread it again. I like keeping things of controversy in the idea that someday knowledge will be suppressed if it doesn't go along with the mode of thought of today or tomorrow times. Since I don't have a whole lot of time to read, I switch to audiobooks now and again. I find them less distracting then listening to podcasts or the radio while I work on a piece or while I'm cooking. Either way, good thread!
 
...Unfortunately I sold off the Kerouac for a quick cash exchange some years ago...
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The Little Free Library steward in me disapproves of you selling anything you might have found in one*, but the book collector/reseller in me wants to ask how much you got for it.... ;-)

*Not really. I would never sell something donated to my LFL, but I don't begrudge others from selling what they take from it if they need the money, as long as it doesn't become a regular habit. I reserve my full stewardly ire for religious and/or political proselytizing (i.e., it's okay to leave a copy of The Book of Mormon in my library, but don't put a business card in it advertising when your services are held).
 
Robert Adam Gilmour said:
This is on my laptop and it isn't working.

I haven't turned on my actual kindle in several years and I don't know if it will still function right.
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It has been a while but as gveranon said, you just go to https://read.amazon.com, provided you have an account and bought stuff on there.

And you can view them in the viewer. It CAN be a bit of a handful if you want to screenshot and copy it for yourself as say a PDF, you can do it but it will take a while.
 
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