h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

With me...it's a sickness.

I used to have that sickness, but never in a big way. Now I have boxes of old books that I still can't bear to throw away, but neither do I want to reread them. That's why I borrow as much as I can. Warehousing them is someone else's job.

One word: Kindle. I've got a warehouse-worth of books in the pocket of my jacket.

Humm I can't fit my kindle about my person. This is probably why I can't use it that much

Yes - I do have a Kindle. Nothing against them. But as I've said previously, what a Kindle doesn't deliver is the serendipity of coming across a second-hand book that you might not have thought to read unless you serendipitously came across it. Plus they're cheaper. Etc. etc.

I suppose sharing people's Goodreads collections is attempting to go some way towards delivering serendipity, but it still hasn't managed to capture the full sensory experience of mining the stacks in an appropriately disordered book shop.

http://bonoboworld.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/my-favourite-shop.html

Also:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/04/amazon-british-operation-corporation-tax?newsfeed=true

"what a Kindle doesn't deliver is the serendipity of coming across a second-hand book that you might not have thought to read unless you serendipitously came across it"

It can deliver almost precisely that experience...

Whisper it... bittorrent a huge library of three or four thousand .mob files of books you'd never have considered buying. And if you like the book, hey, you can always go and pay for it, eh?

"I can't fit my kindle about my person"

This suggests three things:

1. You're quite a small person. Fair enough.

2. You have the wrong kindle - the one without the keyboard fits in the pocket of my fleece, even in its leather case.

3. You have the wrong jacket. Get one with bigger pockets...

David Hockney had a jacket designed with pockets big enough to fit an iPad. I think my husband yearns after such a jacket.. although owning such a garment would require a seriosly new satorial direction...

We have been wondering how he prevents it from hanging lopsided.

...bittorrent is not unknown to me. And sometimes when I've wanted a particular book I've gone to one of the many similar files which all turn out to contain much the same books. However mostly, they don't have what I'm after. I've discovered that they generally have books that I really, really don't want. 'Series' books, if you catch my drift. Certainly they're not a patch on a good, shambolic bookshop (see link).

Again - don't get me wrong. Kindles have their place. Their place includes in my jacket pocket which is big enough to accommodate the new model. But I hope they don't replace real bookshops in my lifetime. And I can't bring myself to rave about them the way some do on the Amazon forums.

(Simple amusement can be had by voicing a minor criticism of Kindles on a Kindle forum. They make the worst Hoo War look like a love-in. )

>>We have been wondering how he prevents it from hanging lopsided.

Two iPads?