Going Shelfless Update

A little while back, I tried an experiment to go shelfless — this was an attempt to reduce the number of physical books that I had in my house so that I could either have fewer shelves or use the shelf space for other things e.g. ornaments and photographs. This meant seeing if I could compile a library consisting of only e-books or audio books. I explored the various websites offering the books and also the various e-book technologies and initially, it all looked quite hopeful. I also discovered an audio books site, audible.com, where you can download audiobooks as MP3s and I was quite excited because I really do enjoy listening to audiobooks — I like being able to do something else while I am being read to.

Unfortunately, the experiment did not go as well as I had hoped. The current state of the e-book landscape is that there are very many file formats and you need different types of e-book readers in order to be able to read a particular format. I downloaded the Mobipocket application as it seemed to have a lot of functionality, including the ability to annotate the E book text. And then I found that some of the books that I wanted to read were not available in that format and I had to download other applications in order to enjoy them. Also, there are not yet enough books being published in electronic format so there were of course some books that I wanted to read which were not yet available electronically.

I was doing all this on my computer and/or laptop that I was also keeping an eye on the dedicated e-book readers that have been coming onto the market e.g. the Amazon Kindle (currently available in the US only) and the Sony Reader. These devices are pretty expensive although sleekly designed — and all they can do is read the books. You can load hundreds of e-book onto them and that is the main advantage. For now, I was not prepared to spend £200 or more on these gadgets so I was stuck with reading books sitting up at my desktop computer or half lying down on the sofa with a hot laptop on my lap.

It all got too complicated, too cumbersome and too irritating so while I am still an advocate for e-books in theory — because of the space saving aspect as well as all the digital advantages such as being able to search and add annotations — at this stage in the game, I have given up on e-books until they sort out the “e-Babel” mess. Having said that, the one device where I have a number of the books still loaded on which I access consistently is my mobile phone: I have an English-French dictionary which is very handy when I visit France and also a book that I am reading very slowly when I am waiting at a bus stop or out and about and have nothing else with me to read.

As for audiobooks, because I live in the UK the audible.com website, which is a US site, would not allow me to sign on and sent me to be UK version of the site. The US version has over 40,000 titles but the UK site has around 20,000 — and the UK titles tend to be the kind of books that you would find in the large print or audiobooks section in your local library i.e. the modern-day equivalent of Catherine Cookson and lightweight titles. The US site has a lot of current affairs and non-fiction titles that are up-to-date with the top seller lists e.g. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and Fareed Zakaria’s The Post American World. I found myself meandering listlessly around the UK site half-heartedly choosing audiobooks that I did not really want just because I was desperate to download a book to listen to. After several months, I gave up and cancelled my account at audible.co.uk. If they increased the selection of titles to the equivalent of the US site, I would certainly consider signing up again.

So the upshot of this sad, sorry tale is that I am back to having very little shelf space while my physical book collection steadily increases! I suspect that this is because we are still in the early days of e-book technology and that once the cost of e-book readers comes down and the different formats and platforms resolve themselves, it will be a lot easier to enjoy electronic books. As for audiobooks, the problem seems to be international copyright issues — given that this is a fraught area of law, who knows when those issues will be resolved! Also, I expect UK listeners’ taste for audiobooks being different from US listeners’ tastes - my sense is that a lot of of US listeners listen to audiobooks in the car during long commutes wearers this habit is not so entrenched in the UK so it is likely that I will had to wait quite a while to be able to access interesting audiobooks in the UK.

What is your experience with the books and/or audiobooks? Are you not surprised by my experience or have you had better luck? Do add a comment and let me know.

Photo: thanks to Muskingum College Library from flickr.com (CCL)