Digital isolation and inadvertent anonymity

In I Murdered My Library, Linda Grant recounts her experience downsizing her living space and the resulting massive reduction in her home library. A lifelong reader, journalist, and novelist she had spent decades collecting books. (As every reader knows, books are always collected, never “hoarded”.) Now she faced the the melancholy task of disposing of most of her library.

According to Vincent Starrett “when we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” For book lovers, the act of shrinking a library is, in some sense, to deplete one’s happiness treasury. For Grant, this personal sense of loss is coupled with the literary professional’s larger concern that fewer and fewer people share her love for books while a growing segment of the population actively hates them

Estate agents do not think that books furnish a room books make rooms look messy. Books’ multi-coloured spines muddle and muddy the Farrow & Ball neutral paint colours, the Ammonite and Hardwick White and Savage Ground. They completely destroy the impact of the accent wall.
…
[Books] are the detritus not just of the digital revolution but of disposable living and small houses.

Thanks to technology, Grant can shrink the space devoted to her library while retaining many of her favorite titles. At first, like most of us, the ebook is a thrilling, liberating marvel.

As I began to buy more ebooks, I felt a sense of surprise and delight and wonder that I could carry around a library in my pocket.

Over time, however, she discovers that even great New Things have limitations and pitfalls. Some are obvious and quickly encountered. Books may be the ultimate “always on” technology; Kindles, not so much:

I’m going to hell, a hell in which eternity is a Kindle with a dead battery.

There are other, subtler effects of a pocket-sized library:

I experienced the sense that I was making my library partly invisible.

As most readers know, this is no minor thing:

Michael Dirda:

Books don’t just furnish a room. A personal library is reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you’d like to know. When I was growing up, there used to be an impressive librarian’s guide entitled Living with Books. I think that’s the right idea. Digital texts are all well and good, but books on shelves are a presence in your life. As such, they become a part of your day-to-day existence, reminding you, chastising you, calling to you.

Umberto Eco:

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

Edith Nesbit

There is no bond like having read and liked the same books.

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