iguanamountain blog

TO OWN BOOKS...

                   

Prompt: Would you rather have 12 published paperback books or 5 published hard cover novels in your life time?

         
         Well, you present the problem of physical books made of paper. I am a person who travels and have often moved from country to country and back again. To own books you have to have a place---like I did in San Francisco, and Hawaii and Wyoming and Iran. Each place I had many books, and often big reference and art history books. (I love books). But each time I had to leave them behind.
         
         Now with air travel the weight is prohibitive, and living in a sailboat-yacht the space is very limited and the moisture and termites destroy books very fast. So I have no books now except some very worn paperbacks of dictionary and thesaurus, navigation and charts. Everything else is digitized and on hard drives.
         
         Books are on my Kindle Reader and just Rich Text copies of stuff I’ve collected. And all of it can fit on a tiny USB ssd or flash. My novels and all the work files and images and years and years of photos, and music...all there. I’m careful and keep lots of copies of those files in different places---and upgrade as technology changes.
         
         This is a different world we live in folks. And I don’t trust cloud storage as they get hacked and changed too often. And if we lose electricity, I have solar panels to charge. The electric sailboat needs those too. And if all else fails, there is still pencil and paper. But I suppose that should be stored in air-tight water proof bags.
         
         I had hard copies of my published books in Tehran. They are still there, sealed in a bag. Now I do have one copy of my new book, Apex Project. I take it out and hold it once in a while. Of course, I think it looks better on Kindle, and you can enlarge the print size.
         
         Still a printed book is a thing of ancient wonder.,,>>>iggy