I was wandering through the greensward with my dogs the other morning, contemplating how to improve my stories and decided I should re-read a bit of Silverberg. His wonderful short fiction has been collected by the highly esteemed Subterranean Press into a series of volumes many of which I have reviewed for SF crowsnest.

Then I remembered that I had given them away to a charity shop. One tidies up occasionally, scans the pile of books and decides that with all the new stuff that old stuff won’t ever be read and is taking up space (see subtitle). Inevitably, I find, the day comes when I want to read it again and I kick myself for giving it away. But my girlfriend would kick me harder if I kept everything because we’d have to live in the garden.

With an e-book reader, you never have to get rid of anything. Even if your device has reached capacity, which is unlikely (mine hasn’t yet) e-books can be stored in the cloud, retrievable whenever you get the urge. If I’d had Silverberg in bytes instead of pages, he would still be available to me.

Of course, I’m just as fond of ‘real’ books as the next person. I particularly prefer graphic novels and comics on real paper but they can be even more of a storage problem. So it may be time to embrace new technology and go with e.

The other advantage of e-readers is that you can enlarge the text size to suit. That’s useful for us old people.

 
P.S. Heinlein predicted e-readers in Stranger in a Strange Land where Gillian is sat in bed with a ‘real book’ and states that she prefers it to the text scrolling across before her on a screen. Heinlein envisaged a flow of words on one line like those advertising things.

 
P.P.S. I’m keeping my CD’s.