I grew up surrounded by books, and was a somewhat early and precocious reader. Not from my own motivation, I might say, but rather to keep up with the Joneses. And by "Joneses" I mean "Older Brother", who had 18 months and about 40 IQ points on me.
But I was going to be damned if I didn't read what he was reading.
And so I was into Tolkien by the time I was 12 or so, and in Freshman (High School) English we asked the teacher if we could read Crime And Punishment, because Steinbeck was a boring old Red. You can imagine her reaction.
Yeah, we read the Dostoyevsky.
And so, I've always had lots of books around. Literally every room in the house has books in it, including the store room and the garage. Not sure if there are any packed away in boxes in the attic, but not sure if there aren't.
All of this is a long winded* introduction to my answer to Brigid: what's on your bookshelf? Project Gutenberg has 36,000 e-books that they've digitized for free download. They only carry books where the copyright has expired or the book has otherwise entered the public domain, but that's a lot.
You know I'm weird, and only read non-fiction (well, mostly). I'm currently struggling through Aquinas. Yeah, it's hard - that's why I'm reading it. Aretae says he was the smartest dude of the Millennium, and that may be about right.
I hate to say it, but Project Gutenberg might just be enough to get me to buy a Kindle. Load up a thousand of the greatest works of history, and see if I can pick up those 40 IQ points to catch up to Older Brother.
Free: Arthur Conan-Doyle, Sir Richard Francis Burton, and yes, Dostoyevsky. All free for the downloading. It's quite a marvelous bookshelf.
* But you were all expecting that, no doubt.
10 comments:
I'm very happy with my color Nook. I've downloaded a few free books on it from Gutenberg. And free ones from B&N.
And some inexpensive books, too.
I still like "real" books, but I'm accepting that my Nook has a place.
"I still like "real" books, but I'm accepting that my Nook has a place."
What he said. I bought and read all three extant Monster Hunter International books on my original Nook, and I've loaded a fair number of Gutenberg titles on it too. Plus I've paid Barnes and Noble full retail for a few books.
I don't care much for reading for long periods on an LCD, so I prefer the eInk display. It's like reading a paperback. I don't have much interest in a tablet or color reader for that reason.
There's been a lot of argument in the writing/publishing/bookselling world about whether e-readers will replace books. I don't think that will happen, for two reasons:
1) Some books just won't be available in electronic format. Try finding a Jeff Cooper ebook.
2) Like North, I just want some books in real, dead tree form. It give the book gravitas.
What e-readers will replace is bookshelves. My Nook currently has about 100 pounds' worth of books on it, and it doesn't weigh any more than the day I bought it.
I wish my gun cabinet worked like that.
I have 'real' dead tree books, but living on the road like I do, I've also picked up a Nook a year ago... I read about 200 books a year, spanning the spectrum, and since I move regularly the Nook is a life (and back) saver.
I don't disagree with anything anyone's said so far, and I don't want to start an argument, but I do want to mention in passing one thing...
"Some books just won't be available in electronic format. Try finding a Jeff Cooper ebook."
I don't know about Cooper; if there's demand, I'd expect to see that (and I'd probably repurchase both volumes of Gunsite Gossip if those became available as ebooks). However, I was shocked recently when I found out that you can get the Standard Catalog of Smith and Wesson, Third Edition as a Nook ebook.
(For what it's worth, I have a huge collection of physical books, I haven't totally bought into the ebook thing yet, but I do have both the Kindle and Nook readers on my phone. I use the Kindle reader for some O'Reilly books that I want to have handy.)
I had been a doctrinaire dead-tree reader until the combination of a)Larry Correia's books on Baen's ARC early release and b) ESR's post on the T-Mobile Comet* got me to buy into the e-book format.
Now I read e-books like mad.
*Tiny Android smart phone that actually fits in a shirt pocket.
My next significant discretionary purpose is going to be a Nook Color. Which will be immediately rooted, so that I can install software for competing formats on it. (I like eInk better...indeed, I'm friends with one of the people who originally invented it. But there's no eInk device that doesn't restrict you to a single bookstore's collection.) I already buy most books preferentially in electronic editions, even lacking a standalone reading device for them. I generally only go for the dead-trees versions of books that I know I'm likely to want to lend widely.
Nevertheless, as a bibliophile married to a gen-u-wine bibliomaniac, bookshelves and their intended content are the principal form of my house's movable furnishings (slightly the majority by square footage, much-less-slightly the majority by mass, and don't-even-bother-counting-anything-else by original purchase price).
I don't begrudge the square footage, really...it's not like I've got anything better to do with most of it anyway. But when one considers the mass and the cost, the appeal of digital books (where a single device will store and display enough reading matter to last me through a year of leisure, and one could cold-store in a box that'd get lost in my wife's purse more books than any human being could hope to read in an ordinary lifetime) becomes clearer.
Oh, and even in the bad old days when I didn't think of being "Red" as such an unpleasant thing, I would have no truck with Steinbeck. Alternately boring, depressing, and simultaneously both boring _and_ depressing, letting him be the voice of semi-covert communism was probably the best propaganda move the capitalists made in the whole of the 20th century.
I read alot.
Magazines.
Books..
I cannot sit and watch TeeVee and not be reading something...Not that I watch TeeVee much.
I have two books going right now.
If I had all the books I ever bought...I would not be living in the house.
I was the kid whom would be reading in class instead of listening to the teacher yak.
Get in trouble and still pull an A or B in the class (I hated school).
I would sit at the dinner table and pull a World Book Encyclopedia, randomly off the book shelf in dining room and start reading it...
And my CRUZ eReader and I have FBreader on my phone and Baen Free Books is my friend!
Reading......when you can't be shooting it is the "other" thing to do.
Well besides the "Honey Do" list but my Honey loves to read as much as I do!!
Oh and the Bible.....
madmedic, that's interesting. I, too, used to read random passages from the World Book encyclopedia.
The family got me a Kindle a couple of weeks ago as an early birthday gift. I love that thing, especially the eink display--beats the snot out of reading ebooks on my iPhone with the backlit screen.
Oh, and I read Barnes & Noble's Nook ebooks on the thing. (Calibre + plugins, people. Wonderful stuff.)
Here's another vote for the Kindle. I even lured my wife away from her iPad to reading on a Kindle. Now she spends more than I do.
Baen Free Library hooked me on Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga, so I had to purchase the rest of the series. Same thing happened with Ringo's Posleen trilogy.
And Gutenberg has allowed me to read the classics that I missed growing up (working on Treasure Island currently).
I still buy paper books, but not at retail prices anymore (well, except for Correia - I've bought paperback and e-books for MHI). Half Price Books and Paperbackswap.com supply most of my "real" book needs.
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