Buy A Book This Christmas. They’re Not Dead, Apparently.

I’m about to be travelling for the holidays.

Over the next few days, I will pack my suitcase and painfully head to the airport – “painfully” because I will repeatedly have to stop and check that I have, in fact, put my passport in my backpack, and then check that the passport is mine, and then that the passport didn’t fall out when I checked to see that it was in fact there and that it was in fact mine.

But eventually, there will be a moment where boarding passes will have been printed and security checks will have been passed and the immigration officers will have stamped my by-this-point-quite-sweaty passport. And then I will go to the bookshop and spend a glorious 20 minutes rifling around for something to read on the plane.

Even though I have an entire library of books stored on my e-reader.

Why?

Because the book is not dead. And because there is something deeply satisfying about in-person browsing that has not yet been replicated by the Apple Bookstore.

Happy Christmas Eve!

Rolling Alpha posts opinions on finance, economics, and the corporate life in general. Follow me on Twitter @RollingAlpha, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/rollingalpha.

Comments

Kosta December 27, 2014 at 11:22

This was on helluva interesting inforgraphic, thanks for sharing.

I have an e-reader (a Kindle Paperwhite – which is the best one in my opinion (but don’t get me started on that)), which I use often (mostly in bed – thanks to its silent page flipping and built-in backlight (I’m getting started on that it seems). Anyway, point is, I continue to buy books. I just love books. And I love my bookshelves. And when I visit other peoples’ homes, I love examaning their bookshelves. It says a lot about a person and you can also rapidly figure out what you have in common.

I tend to only buy hard-cover books though, since thhey keep better, which makes me wonder what my primary buying motive is – it’s not so much the “I get to hold a physical book in my hands” that many people talk about (I honestly don’t care about how my book smells); I think, for me at least, it has more to do with my considering my bookshelvf as some kind of asset that I’ve invested in, and whose make-up defines my character.

Kosta December 27, 2014 at 11:24

Holiday typo monster attacked me hard, to that point that I feel a disclaimer-esque reply is warranted. Happy holidays Jayson!
Reply
Jayson January 21, 2015 at 14:24

Kosta – I am totally running at your speed. This quote from Nassim Taleb in the opening chapter of “The Black Swan”:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

That said, I feel like there is also a place for read books. For me, they’re a kind of grand visual personal timeline. I can skim through the bookshelves, and see who and where I was and am. Which maybe gets a little overboard poetic – but sometimes, that’s the only way to describe it. I don’t keep all the books that I’ve read, but I keep the ones that were impactful. So it makes total sense to me that you’d want hardbacks. That type of reading is more valuable than cheap paperback fiction.

It wants a dustjacket and a spine.
Reply

Kosta December 27, 2014 at 11:22

This was on helluva interesting inforgraphic, thanks for sharing.

I have an e-reader (a Kindle Paperwhite – which is the best one in my opinion (but don’t get me started on that)), which I use often (mostly in bed – thanks to its silent page flipping and built-in backlight (I’m getting started on that it seems). Anyway, point is, I continue to buy books. I just love books. And I love my bookshelves. And when I visit other peoples’ homes, I love examaning their bookshelves. It says a lot about a person and you can also rapidly figure out what you have in common.

I tend to only buy hard-cover books though, since thhey keep better, which makes me wonder what my primary buying motive is – it’s not so much the “I get to hold a physical book in my hands” that many people talk about (I honestly don’t care about how my book smells); I think, for me at least, it has more to do with my considering my bookshelvf as some kind of asset that I’ve invested in, and whose make-up defines my character.
- Kosta December 27, 2014 at 11:24
  
  Holiday typo monster attacked me hard, to that point that I feel a disclaimer-esque reply is warranted. Happy holidays Jayson!
- Jayson January 21, 2015 at 14:24
  
  Kosta – I am totally running at your speed. This quote from Nassim Taleb in the opening chapter of “The Black Swan”:
  
  The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
  
  That said, I feel like there is also a place for read books. For me, they’re a kind of grand visual personal timeline. I can skim through the bookshelves, and see who and where I was and am. Which maybe gets a little overboard poetic – but sometimes, that’s the only way to describe it. I don’t keep all the books that I’ve read, but I keep the ones that were impactful. So it makes total sense to me that you’d want hardbacks. That type of reading is more valuable than cheap paperback fiction.
  
  It wants a dustjacket and a spine.

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