In unfamiliar homes I hunt down bookshelves – Billy or bespoke. I look for hints of who the owner is: what they think, their aspirations, their personality, their beliefs and prejudices, their passions and predilections. A collection of books is as unique and telling as lines on a face.
Opinion: Ebooks may be convenient - but they don’t enrich your life
So what’s the answer if in just a few short years we’re all hypothetically going to be reading via digital devices? How do we keep this sense of… of conveying who we are through our reading?
The truth is I don’t know. It could be services like GoodReads of Shelfari, but I doubt it. I don’t think there is a killer service for sharing reading habits yet and when it does come along, I think it’ll take a very different form.
But maybe this is just one of those things that we end up losing. Perhaps there is no digital replacement for that sense of someone we get from browsing their bookshelves. With fundamental change almost always comes sacrifice.
Unfortunately, we can’t have everything.
