I Is A Dinosaur

I have this big expanse of wall space in my study, and I dream of getting shelves put there, from one end to the other. I've had this dream for a year (and some months) now. The shelves aren't wide like the store-bought bookshelves, but are from precut planks from Lowes or Home Depot--8 inches--so I could stack my books sideways, titles upright, and they'd al fit precisely up to the next plank/shelf, so that I don't have to dust.

In the course of this one-plus year of dreaming, almost everyone I know online has bought an e-reader or is thinking of one. Kindle. Nook. I-Phone. I-Pad. Sony. Many love their new lifestyle--no more heavy books, no more piles around the house, space is now free for other things.

From the standpoint of the new world of ebooks, I'm an utter Fail. You see, I have this nasty habit of browsing through my chosen novel, sometimes starting from The End.  Granted, it's possible to do this with an ebook, with e-reader of choice, but it hasn't given me the same odd satisfaction. I can't seem to flip backwards the same.

Of course, I realize that I'm just an odd duck and the industry is passing me by.  Almost every voracious reader is downloading like crazy--free ebooks, free samples, free galleys, buying more books than ever before--and here I am, still building shelves.

I mean, how medieval. People have virtual shelves now, showing off covers of their acquired ebooks, storing their library in the "Cloud," a place where virtual books exist to be called upon at leisure from anywhere in this world, unless, of course, you're hit by a natural disaster like a hurricane and you're knocked offline for 2 weeks.  Then your storage is off-limits till wifi and electricity return.

But even then, a savvy reader doesn't just have one source of ebooks.  There are those who know how to break the DRM and store their book files into their I-phones.  There are ebooks sold without DRM and these one could store in one's e-device of choice.

So I stare at my medieval shelves and wonder: why should I give these books space in my house when I could put them in the Cloud?  Imagine, a study with no clutter or piles of books.

Maybe I'm just a stasher by nature. I like to stash things, especially books. Shelves upon shelves of touchable books make me deliriously happy for some reason, that looking at virtual shelves does't. Besides, I'm not very organized by nature. I know where my physical books are, even if they're shelved out of order.  Over on top, all oldie Nora Roberts.  In bedroom, all Presents, especially Bianchin and Reid. Far right, a mixture of paranormals, with some Merline Lovelace SIMs that wandered in there that I hadn't gotten the time to move to another spot. And uh, those piles? That's my Loot from various conventions that I haven't gotten to yet. Sue me, but the Loot always makes me rub my hands in glee because I know I'll get to play with them some day.

I just know, if I jump to everything e-books, I'll never know where my files are.  Or, if I'm smart enough to put them all in one place, none of them would be arranged in a way that I could easily find an oldie for rereading. I look at my files in My Documents on my computer and know that would be how my virtual books would look like--everything saved haphazardly, with the odd folder for a manuscript. And somehow, looking at lines and lines of titles on a screen just doesn't give me the same glee.

This is how dinosaurs died off, you know.  They were too big and couldn't adapt to the new Age.

Off I go looking at that wall again....

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