Giving up print—a conversion story
Bruce Bartlett had an interesting piece in Forbes two weeks ago called Recycling Books in which he describes the process that allowed him to slowly wean himself from print, and move on to reading digital. For him it started with journals:
I even bought a house twice as large as I needed just to have space for book and journal storage. But I didn’t mind, because my books and journals were an important part of my human capital. When people hired me they were also hiring access to my library, which eventually grew to 30,000 volumes or more.
But over the last few years, the Internet has radically reduced my need for a large private library. Now virtually every important academic journal is available online. My local library in Fairfax County, Va., has free online access to many journals I was spending good money for. The state library in Richmond has remote access to many more.
Throwing away this capital proved a painful process, perhaps also because “nobody wanted them” when Bartlett tried to give his journals away. Next for the chopping block were his books, and that’s when Bartlett discovered a useful property of Amazon—it can double as an exchange program for the cheap books that you don’t need to have handy:
I quickly discovered that many of my books really aren’t worth much, at least monetarily. This made it easier to part with them, because if it turns out that I actually need one that I have sold I’ll just buy another copy. In the meantime, someone else can store it for me.
Bruce Bartlett (1951) is a historian turned economist who worked for the administrations of US presidents Reagan and Bush Jr.
Leave a Reply