The End of Private Libraries

The author talks about how acquiring books reflects their personal story, time spent, interests etc, and then seems sad and surprised that kids don't want their parents' libraries ... But presumably those kids have their own interests and landmarks of their course through life. I fully expect to keep a handful of my parents personal books that I have specific memories of, but keeping the whole of their libraries feels as pointless as keeping all of their furniture or all of their wardrobes (also things that one can spend a lifetime acquiring and spending time with).

Stepping into the library of someone who has passed on can be very personal, and confusing. Who were you, that you have 31 volumes of Reader’s Digest condensed books, shelved next to Josephus, a full matched set of the Waverly novels, a mixed bag of Dorothy Sayers paperbacks, and a nearly complete run of Boy’s Life from 1956-1961? I think the most respectful thing you can do with such a collection is to find people who appreciate parts of it, and pass the books on to them.

I love having a wall of books and the time spent on reading books.

Unluckily I do not have either of those. The never ending competition between society memebers for better position and more stuff to show sucked me in too, making me move for better places to compete others and do things much quicker and doing more things - in unit of time and overall too. All those moves made the collection of my books go way down to be a sad excuse of personal library. It is a short shelf. The same cruel race took time away from reading too. I should have enjoyed life more than participating this stupid and on the end futile race called career. Let others trying to disrupt the f world along pretentious figments. It did not worth it, not at all. What worths to live for is elsewhere. Partly in reading books and having a good personal library.

This post is a bit dramatic. My wife and I have 1-2k books. We know multiple people who have such libraries. I don't think they're going anywhere. And this is even though I have a Kindle.

The lament of collecting something of great personal value, which is of value to no one else, reminds me of my photo collection: over 100,000 photos taken over decades, which I absolutely cherish, that are completely worthless to anyone but me, or the people contained within them (who I have usually already shared the relevant photos with). Perhaps it's no accident that the common term for a personal collection of photos is a photo library.

For folks clearing out the parents' library, consider a donation to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt (yes, the one built to replace the famous one of old). But before that, figure out how to collect, accumulate, & ship books to the library in a way that is sufficiently low cost, somehow funded by donors, and in a way that tbe library signals a priori that it is willing to sift through on-site (and for which it signals it exert influence on the import authorities). b/c despite its symbolic imoortabce, the library has a lot of empty shelfspace now two+ decades after its opening.

What the new library has in spades is prodigious fire-suppression technologies, so choose books you feel deserve special preservation into posterity.

Good riddance to this kind of library. His relationship with his private library is the same as most people's: an outlet for comfortable consumerism, materialism, and nostalgia.

What he needed was an antilibrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilibrary

The mysterious unread tomes of an antilibrary taunt you and beckon to be read, but not necessarily re-read. The untrodden path holds more adventure than the beaten one, where the treasure has already been claimed. Books in an antilibrary are quests filling up your log, the rewards of yet unknown, possibly great.

I wish more people gave their books away slowly during their lives, instead of all at once upon their death. It's a much nicer way to inherit them and it lets you share the experience with the inheritors.

Private libraries are the privilege of those who do not move frequently, or at all. A large library is surprisingly heavy and bulky to move, and each time you move you will be tempted to leave something behind. If the odds of leaving it behind are even 5% then over time the odds approach 100%. That said, the physical copy of a book has its own story, the dog-eared pages and cracked spines, the occasional stain. I personally somehow find myself remembering which side of a book something was on, and roughly how far through. Very handy since it reduces the search space immediately by 2, at least. And of course, you get all the benefits of messy, imprecise search - the joy of finding something new. Plus you can easily lend them or give them away, and they can't be remotely deleted.

The OP writes as if ebooks and paper books (and audio books!) live in perfect zero-sum disharmony. It seems like most inventions have this effect on discourse. This is more a comment on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle than anything. In this case, I think large paper libraries will tend to dwindle, but not disappear. Much like how accurate music recording and playback caused live music to dwindle, but not disappear, etc.

Books are like candles, an obsolete technology that we will keep around forever because they look nice and they are good in a power cut (or in the bath)

I used to buy lots and lots of physical books.

When I had a child though it forced me to downsize since the bedroom with four bookshelves became a kids room. I had to reckon with ‘Why am I holding on to this specific book?’ and in many cases I just couldn’t answer that question. Now I’m very picky about what I do acquire because I don’t have the space to expand much without pushing other things out.

I can't wait till there are physical books that will let you:

1. Find words almost straight away.

2. Change the font and its size.

3. Change the line spacing.

4. Scroll and use the top of the screen to keep track of where you are so you don't skip lines.

5. Have hyperlinks to footnotes. (Edit: I meant endnotes.)

6. Have bookmarks with labels that don't affect the reading experience.

7. Jump to chapters immediately.

8. Hold it the same way, no matter where you are in the book.

9. Read it discretely.

Books are similar to other collectables. I inherited my late father's stamp collection recently. He spent a lifetime carefully searching for certain ones and picking others up from shows, the post office, or the Internet.

I don't think I could ever find enough mail I wanted to send to use up even a 100th of them. I collected a few when I was a kid, but never caught the bug like he did.

It seems a shame to throw them out or sell them for pennies on the dollar, knowing how much time and money he spent on them; but that is what will probably happen. I will keep a few in a binder or two for sentimental reasons. They made him happy so they served their purpose.

Head over to r/bookshelfdetective and you'll see a bunch of folks hyped to share their libraries with the world. Maybe such folk are a dwindling but more vocal crowd. Maybe not.

Numbers aside, this line makes me think OP is missing the point:

> I bought the book because I like having a visual, tangible record of the time this book and I spent together. I like scanning my shelves and seeing proof of a rich reading life.

If this is why you have books (I've heard them called "audiobook-trophies" or "kindle-trophies"), you're missing out on what a library can do for you. A library kept in OP's way shows how many books he's got through. What matters his how many books get through him. The proof of a good reading life is inside you. It's not furniture for your living room.

What is a good library then if not a trophy case? It's got books that you go back to again and again. It's got books you've not read yet but whose spines reminds you of gaps in what you know. It's aimed at the long-term, a collection of pages whose text will never reflow or get a pushed update. It's markings won't change, letting you have a talk with your older self.

I have many audiobooks and ebooks, and they're better at some things than physical books. Still, what a hard drive can't do what a personal library can.

I thought the title meant "the era of private libraries is over", but it's really about "the end-of-life of my private library". As a physical book lover, I empathize.

Many years in the future, after global warming wrecks our world, when humanity rebuilds civilization, they will be glad for folks like this person. Without physical books there will be no way to reconstruct our time and tell our story. Digital media will be useless to future generations if there’s a blip in continuity.

My personal library has grown massively in the last few years. I have a few rooms with the walls covered with textbooks and deluxe/limited editions of classic works. They're very comforting to look at, at least when I'm not stepping over piles of books in the floor.

I have a 2k epub collection.

My bookworm friends claim it's not a "real" private library

I think smaller apartments and lack of storage space might be a driver for buying less books. However, while I do feel modern apartments are smaller, I don't know if this feeling is true.

You probably have tens of thousands of unnecessary documents and other files hoarded on your computers, right? This seems like much the same thing to me, it's just digital now.

This beautifully captures the bittersweet reality of book lovers in a digital age

Nostalgia is a powerful thing

Sounds like consumerism

You will own nothing and be happy.