You’re converting your entire library to e-books. Quick! Which books would you jettison, and which books would you love enough to re-buy or scan or convert into electronic form?
For many e-book-lovers, this bibliophilic triage would be just an intellectual exercise to identify favorite books.
But for someone I know, it is a practical reality. Me.
Housing prices, both rental and sales, are out of control in the Toronto area where I live. A small one-bedroom condo would sell for what my out-of-town sister spent on her three-bedroom house. Just imagine what life is like for e-book-lovers in New York, Tokyo or London.
My own one-bedroom apartment is affordable thanks to its less desirable pre-war construction and lack of an elevator, but I lack the space there to store print copies of every book I love. And I have found I am able to keep a more attractive and livable home when I trim the Ficbot E-Collection.
So I gave over my shelf space to nonfiction, which I prefer on paper, and to DVDs and other media. And I got rid of every fiction title that was available in e-book form. Many of them, I decided, I would not read again. Others I decided I would still like to own, and I added them to my Fictionwise wish list and re-bought them as sale coupons and store credit balance permitted. Today, with a 25-percent-off coupon, I bought the last of them and now consider my e-conversion done.
The books I’m keeping in one format or another
Using the criteria of “books which I owned in paper and cared enough about to re-acquire in ebook,” what would my list of all-time favorite books be? Two quick notes about this list:
- I am including classic/public domain/free books on this list only if I once owned a paper copy. I do enjoy other free books, but I am not including them here unless my e-version is replacing a book for which I once paid money for a paper copy.
- I am including as well the handful of paper books I still own for which no e-book version could be found. I will note which books these are with an asterisk *. You can assume that all other books were commercially available at major e-book stores, and purchased there.
And now the list:
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
* Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
The Great Santini by Pat Conroy
* Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
Overclocked by Cory Doctorow
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow
The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
* The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
Three Plums in One by Janet Evanovich
* Not Wanted on the Voyage by Timothy Findley
Detective Stories by Jacques Futrelle
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
The Beach by Alex Garland
* Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi
The Stand by Stephen King
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Where the Heart is by Billie Letts
Wicked by Gregory MacGuire
* Fall on Your Knees by Anne-Marie MacDonald
* The Way the Crow Flies by Anne-Marie MacDonald
The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
* The Secret Book of Grazia de Rossi by Jacqueline Park
Bel Canto by Anne Patchett
Mort by Terry Pratchett
Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett
Naked in Death by J.D. Robb
Humans by Robert J. Sawyer
Collected Comedies by William Shakespeare
Collected Tragedies by William Shakespeare
Sonnets by William Shakespeare
The Little Prince/Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
* Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
* To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
* The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
So there you have it, the fifty favorites I cared enough about to put my money where my love is and buy/acquire again in e-form. Not a bad list!
Image credit: The Bookworm, an 1850 painting by Carl Spitzeg.
I guess I’ll have to keep my paper copy of ‘The Stand’ as I found the 1990s version vastly inferior to the 1970s version. I doubt the original will ever be ‘e.’
I’ve been reading Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and finally abandoned it. The story seemed too fragmented to me. Interesting to see that it’s a favorite for others.
I’ve spent the past 6 months in a one BR apartment (I’ll be moving into my new house at the end of the month) and, like you, I’ve had to essentially eliminate my paper collection (except a few of my own books…I definitely can’t make myself throw those out). How cool that eBooks let you have a sprawling mess of a library without having to pay rent for it. I read about people who complain about only renting eBooks and smile. For me, it’s the paper books I have to pay rent on.
Rob Preece
Publisher
Wow! I’m proud that one of my books is on your list! 🙂 And, yes, Toronto housing prices are crazy! 😉
(By the way, I read Teleread.org every day.)
Well, Robert, you can bet that Ficbot and I are equally proud—right back! If you ever want to write for us on e-book matters, the door is wide open. I’m reachable at dr [at] teleread.com.
Thanks,
David
Robert, I have the other two in the series in ebook form but have not read them yet, Why is Flashforward not in ebook anywhere? I looked when the show came out. And you know, that sort of thing is the perfect cross-marketing opportunity for all sides and I can’t believe they are not plugging the book, ebook or any other variation at every commercial break when that show is on. That is exactly the sort of cross-promotion publishers need to be thinking of these days if they really want to grow the market 🙂
Flash Forward (in there as two words, not one) is available now at Fictionwise, as is Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog (and I think much of Willis’s backlist is due to be issued as e in the next few months.
Bests,
–tr
An attribute of e-readers is space saving. Space saving also gets attention in library collection building. An up-turn in downtown rentals or down-turn in operations budgets usually get a space-saving slant.
Is space is an excessive cost of print books? Do books just consume a valuable commodity or is space, like electricity for e-readers, an activation energy or performative prerequisite? It may be that space is a feature of reality inherent to the display of print books. And, as such, the cost of space could then be compared with the cost of electricity. Is the electrical infrastructure and the network wasted on screen display?