A new era in my life starts today: My Kindle arrived. I will now start reading all my books digitally. I will buy my books online from Amazon, and I won’t be buying as much from Costco, Barnes and Noble and Borders as a result. But that’s not why it defines an era.
Ever since I was a teenager I have collected the books I read. This probably comes from a habit my father had, who liked to have all his books on shelves in his study. I never had enough room to display all my books in the house. All my life I have carted boxes of books around with me and they were usually stored in a corner of the garage.
From time to time I purged them. For instance, in the mid 1990ies I got tired of owning all those German books. I put them all together into a set of boxes and donated them to the local library.
Another time we had a garage sale and somebody bought a lot of my science fiction paperbacks for 25 cents each. I made perhaps ten or twenty dollars. I have regretted doing that many times, since I have re-bought some of those books again new when I wanted to read them again and spent many times the money I made in the garage sale.
Lesson: Never sell books in garage sales.
So what’s different going forward? I won’t have books accumulate in boxes anymore. I will be carrying my entire library of reading material with me at all times in digital format in a container the size of a medium soft-cover book. I am not sure how I’ll feel about that – no more bookshelves. For now I am excited about the new way, and I will report on how it goes here.