I bought my last Kindle book on February 12. It was Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I didn’t know it was my last Kindle book at the time; shortly afterwards I saw a post on social media from someone saying they went to download one of their books from the website and there was a notice saying Amazon was dropping support for that functionality.
I’m not precisely sure when I bought my first book from Kindle, but I know it was sometime in 2007. It was Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. I’ve never finished the book because there’s a bit in there where Dawkins explains that he doesn’t need to know anything about religions other than Islam or Christianity because they are all lies, and at that point I realized he was full of shit and I didn’t need to read anything else he had to say either. (Some arguments are a double-edged sword.)
It’s entirely possible that stuff serves as a proxy for those in life who we cannot hold onto, and as protection against the moment when we’ll have to let go. If so, stuff does a poor job.
I just checked, and I don’t actually have that book backed up anywhere. Which is no great loss. I do have about 1400 others, though, downloaded and indexed and backed up, along with a quarter-century of Audible purchases, digital versions of all of my CDs (in FLAC) as well as the digital purchases I’ve made over the years, and a sizable portion of my movie library. That digital movie library is a reflection of my physical collection, which literally surrounds me in my office here at home.
Amazon was once a great and innovative force in the ebook world, but long after it became obvious that they were a bad actor and an exploitative company I continued to buy from them. Part of it was ecosystem lock-in, part of it was convenience. Kindle DRM has been pretty easy to work around, and the syncing across multiple devices — and sometimes with the audiobook version! — was pretty hard to let go of. But making it more difficult to manage my own copy is a dealbreaker for me, no matter how disruptive or inconvenient it is.
The collector’s mindset is stronger in me than any other concern.
An opportunity to reflect
This disruption in my patterns of consumption and hoarding has forced me to think a bit, though. While talking about breaking ties with Kindle, I told a friend of mine: “If 95% of my media library disappeared, it probably wouldn’t make any difference. I just don’t know which 5% would.”
It’s not as easy as weeding these collections out; things that are not important to me today, I’ve learned, can be very important to me tomorrow. I have a deep concern that I will not be able to lay hands on something again when I want it, and feel a considerable amount of satisfaction when I can produce some oddity from my bookshelf. Libraries and rentals don’t do this for me because I have to give those back. And the DRMed, digital, licensed, quote-unquote purchase (that isn’t really) is even worse because these things disappear silently… and you don’t know it’s gone until you go looking for it.
An entirely too-accurate drawing of me.
I’m always disappointed when I go get a movie off my shelf and discover disc-rot has set in, but knowing something in my library has disappeared because someone decided I shouldn’t have it anymore is intolerable.
A lot of other collectors know what I am talking about, but I am beginning to recognize this mindset is pathological. Many of these books, albums, and movies I will never engage with again. Many of them I’ve never engaged with the first time. If they are physical goods, they take up space in my house. I worry about them getting damp, getting damaged, getting sun-bleached. If they are digital goods, storing them costs time and money. I get to worry about hardware failures, redundant backups, databases, delivery systems.
Physical or not, these goods weigh on me. They take up space in my head, if not my house. They are ether-clutter. It is brain pollution. I need to stop. I need to revisit the media I already own. And yet…
And yet.
I pre-ordered a new book today.
