Charlottesquare wrote:Afraid I was a charity bookshop fiend, not helped by the likes of Oxfam having bespoke bookshops (Do you know you can donate books to them under Gift Aid)
Yes I did. While books are not all that I give under gift aid to the British Heart Foundation, I am regularly surprised by the amount of money, and in particular the tax they reclaim, upon my "gifts". Technically the items are not gifts but sold for me and the money raised then gifted, allowing the tax to be reclaimed.
TheMotorcycleB wrote:Then you read "Eco Umberto's AntiLibrary".
For others, Eco argues that it's little value keeping books that you have read and great value in having instant access to books that you haven't read. He does so in paper form in a library.
Personally I regard the instant access that I have to ebooks over the internet as a great improvement. I did have a room dedicated to storing books. Over the last 15 or so years I have culled a lot of them. Does that mean that I've got rid of them? Well not in all cases. Some I have felt strongly enough about to buy replacement electronic versions, while others still remain.
Some may think that there are issues with sharing these Ebooks with the rest of the Family. Not a bit of it. I store a copy of them on a Raspberry Pi running Calibre as a server. Anyone on the home network can visit a web page (library) and download a book. There is a plug-in from Apprentice Alf that will strip the DRM so that the books are not simply rented.
Of course there are books that don't work anything like as good as ebooks. So I view them as a special case, because they are. However it is worth mentioning that paper books for some reason don't have scaleable type and images can't be zoomed.
I also listen to a lot of Audio books. They are great as you can listen while driving or cleaning the kitchen.
As yet there is nothing quite like Calibre for Audio books, though the OpenAudible software shows significant promise. Calibre was started quite a while ago and has had time to develop into what it is today.
I listened, rather than read, Talib's "Black swan" and "Prisoners of Geography" as well as many other books. Some simply don't work as Audio books "as you can see in the chart provided...". Rather surprisingly the PoG book worked. If a book doesn't work as a Audio book, there is always the option of buying the ebook, OR, if you are a scribbler the paper book so that you can write in the margins.
Audio books are not cheap to produce, but are surprisingly cheap to buy. I suspect that has something to do with supply and demand!
Ebooks are stupidly cheap to reproduce. Hence back catalogues are rapidly becoming more available. You also don't just have to buy from Amazon. Baen is a great source for SF books and have republished many old SF works, as well as supporting new authors.