Ways to kill off your collection…and your friends

There’s a scene in the movie Out of Africa , where Meryl Streep’s character, Karen Blixen, is looking at books belonging to Denys Finch Hatton, and says to Berkeley Cole (and this is paraphrased from memory): “Does he lend his books?”

Berkeley Cole says:  “Denys once lent a book to a friend, and the friend never gave it back.  Denys was furious.  I said to him ‘You wouldn’t lose a friend over a silly book, would you?’

“‘No,’ he said.  ‘But he has, hasn’t he?’”

Why is non-return of borrowed books so endemic?  Clichés are created when something happens a lot, and friends failing to return books is a classic cliché.

Yet I feel much as the fictional Finch Hatten felt; the depletion of my personal library is a disaster to me.  If people are going to borrow books, why can’t they borrow the crappy ones, the wall-thumpers?  But no, they borrow the best books in your collection, and then cheerfully fail to return them.  It doesn’t even register on their conscience.  After all, failing to return books is such a common thing, it’s barely above notice.

I have also had to suffer the complete and utter loss of every book in my collection, too.  It wasn’t a house fire or a literary thief that did it.  What happened?  I moved countries.  Specifically, I was only able to move countries on my shoe-string, single mother budget by dint of selling every book I owned at every flea market, every weekend, for four months straight.

Moving countries can actually be a larger disaster to a fiction freak than simply losing all your books in a fire.  If you’ve been inflicted with fire, then you can slowly go about replacing your collection, possibly even with new editions.  But if you move countries, then some of your favourite authors are no longer available to you.  I’ve been in Canada just over ten years now, and I still haven’t been able to replace all the books I owned in Australia.  The authors that were my favourites there are completely unheard of here.

I think this is the single biggest advantage Amazon has for a reader over other brick & mortar stores; there’s all the UK, CA, ZA, AU versions, where you can get books over there that you can’t get here (wherever your “here” happens to be). And I haven’t been paid or encouraged to say this.  I genuinely love the range of books Amazon makes available.  I grew up reading the best fiction from three different continents.  Now I’m down to one continent, the ability to find old favourites on-line and actually be able to buy them and possess them once more is such an unexpected gift.  I just wish it’d come around sooner.  After ten years, I’m actually starting to forget some of the less-frequently-read books I used to own.

The other way I lose books is because I read them, and I’m so thrilled with them, I just have to share the joy.  I literally push them into friends’ hands, and insist they have to read it now! And, of course, they fail to give them back.

I’m betting that a good portion of all piracy of electronic books is generated the same way.  Someone reads a book, loves it, and wants to share the joy with her friends.  So she emails a copy off to them, with a demand that they read it now.  Even better, her copy stays safely on her hard drive. After all, everyone knows how bad people can be at returning books.

So piracy is committed simply as an outcome of the readers’ appreciation for a good tale told well.

The other pirates who are selling the copies for profit…well, they may yet have to live with the consequences of their trade;  the less real money that reaches the pockets of authors, the less time they have to write.  I hate the idea of my favourite authors slowing down the production of their novels because they have to get a part time or full time job.  That’s depletion of all our personal libraries at the most permanent level.  Who knows what classics those author may have written if they weren’t sweating it out at the day job?