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We’re a bit shorter this week as I took half the week off to attend a wedding.

Own Physical Books

One thing that’s always hard when I travel is choosing which books to bring. I never get to read as much as I think I will, and I don’t really love the idea of tramping around with 5 unread hardcover books in my luggage. While some people just grab their Kindle, and I have one I used for many years, I have more and more come to the realisation that you should try to own physical copies of your books.

With all the book banning going on now it feels like it’s only a matter of time before “concerned adults” try to start cornering technology companies like Apple and Amazon to try and push their ideas of “appropriate” reading material on the rest of the citizens around them. That is the achilles heal of the convenience of carrying around 500 books in your pocket, if anyone can put enough pressure on your ebook supplier to remove a book, they can remove it from all devices and then…no one has access to the book.

Unfortunately the library isn’t even safe from government overreach in tracking who reads what. Since 2001 the USA PATRIOT act has given the US government excessive powers to gather information on American citizens which librarians have had to stand up to. But now we see states pass laws allowing parents to view each book taken out by their children.

On the surface this seems fine, because parents are responsible for children, but it’s a slipper slope of rights removal. Start with the kids for their “safety” but then move on to others because they’re reading stuff that a small but vocal minority doesn’t like. They’re starting to boil the proverbial frog.

This is where owning physical books comes in to play. If MAUS becomes a banned book because it shows some of the horrors that Nazi Germany committed someone will have to come to my house and find the book to remove it. They’ll have to go to every household that owns a copy and remove it from each home to fully ban the book. This is a sisyphean task making the banning of specific books all but impossible. Some copy somewhere will survive and the very act of banning the books incurs the streisand effect on the book making sure more people know about it than would have known without the publicity.

Given all this, I think that owning physical copies of books is subversive and I encourage ownership of this thing that can’t be easily taken away from you. I encourage sharing banned books specifically because their banned.

I know owning physical books is hard for some. They can be expensive. You have to have the room to store them. You must move them if you own them.

But with all their trade offs, owning physical copies of books is a great way to make sure knowledge is available without someone looking over your shoulder to approve what you’re learning.

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