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Book guilt
Aug. 13th, 2014 11:47 amI'm not reading less than I used to, but I feel like I'm helping kill the publishing industry, or at least putting a stake through the heart of its corpse.
Case in point: There are a few remaining bookstores in Seattle (and even one poetry-only bookstore, which amazes me). I wandered in to a few, but did I buy anything? No I did not. I did buy a comic (Issue #1 of C.O.W.L., which I have been dying to read, because there is still no adequate digital substitute for paper comics), but no books. Previous trips to anywhere urban in the States tend to involve me carting loads of books back because they're cheaper there. But I have no bookshelf room left, even post-purge.
What's filling the gap in my literary life is ebooks–see aforementioned lack of space, plus I tend to read most on transit and in situations where I need to wait a lot, and the Little Red Book fits in my purse. I was all excited to get home and discover that one of my digital holds had come in to the library, and thus I could take out a library book without hauling ass all the way down the street to the library, and without having to put on pants. Great. Convenient. This is not a viable business model, though, either in terms of keeping libraries as brick-and-mortar institutions (which I think is valuable, because they're one of the few public spaces left), or in terms of paying authors. There is no reason why I should have had to wait two weeks for a digital hold to come in, either; infinite copies of every ebook exist. The limitation is purely artificial, an attempt to mimic traditional publishing and library models. In theory, if it were a bestseller and not yet another biography of Kim Philby that only I and three other people care about, I probably could have pirated it (I wouldn't, though, because I want the library to get the stats; I don't feel bad about pirating movies or telly, but I do feel bad about pirating books).
This is hard to reconcile. I mean, I still ostensibly work in publishing, making (really beautiful, I must say) paper books for a small Canadian press, but for myself, I never really buy books if I can help it.
The solution, as always, is communist revolution, but in the meantime I feel like a bad reader.
Case in point: There are a few remaining bookstores in Seattle (and even one poetry-only bookstore, which amazes me). I wandered in to a few, but did I buy anything? No I did not. I did buy a comic (Issue #1 of C.O.W.L., which I have been dying to read, because there is still no adequate digital substitute for paper comics), but no books. Previous trips to anywhere urban in the States tend to involve me carting loads of books back because they're cheaper there. But I have no bookshelf room left, even post-purge.
What's filling the gap in my literary life is ebooks–see aforementioned lack of space, plus I tend to read most on transit and in situations where I need to wait a lot, and the Little Red Book fits in my purse. I was all excited to get home and discover that one of my digital holds had come in to the library, and thus I could take out a library book without hauling ass all the way down the street to the library, and without having to put on pants. Great. Convenient. This is not a viable business model, though, either in terms of keeping libraries as brick-and-mortar institutions (which I think is valuable, because they're one of the few public spaces left), or in terms of paying authors. There is no reason why I should have had to wait two weeks for a digital hold to come in, either; infinite copies of every ebook exist. The limitation is purely artificial, an attempt to mimic traditional publishing and library models. In theory, if it were a bestseller and not yet another biography of Kim Philby that only I and three other people care about, I probably could have pirated it (I wouldn't, though, because I want the library to get the stats; I don't feel bad about pirating movies or telly, but I do feel bad about pirating books).
This is hard to reconcile. I mean, I still ostensibly work in publishing, making (really beautiful, I must say) paper books for a small Canadian press, but for myself, I never really buy books if I can help it.
The solution, as always, is communist revolution, but in the meantime I feel like a bad reader.
