I’m starting to come around to the idea of eBooks. I still appreciate the physicality and ruggedness of printed texts, and I’m wary of DRM, simply because I’m the sort of person who’d want to try out a new sort of reader every eighteen months.

But recent developments have persuaded me that electronic texts really are the future. And by “recent developments” I mean I’m moving house.

Volumes and mass

Yes, over the past few days the conclusion has been pretty much forced upon me that, by 21st century standards, books are an impossibly inefficient medium. In eBook form my entire library would fit on a single SD card. In actual form it occupies (to a rough and ready estimate) around forty cubic feet of my house. Physicality is nice, but when you consider London property prices, it’s an expensive luxury.

And that’s before you consider the cost of carting physical books around, which is just as crazy, whether you measure it in pounds or calories — because, of course, when you collect books together they quickly start to get heavy. They talk about the paperless office; I say, roll on the paperless library, with bulky paper replaced by weightless patterns of ones and zeroes.

Ripping yarns

Of course, there are practical issues associated with switching to electronic texts. My books include academic works, old computer manuals and numerous TV tie-ins from the 1970s and 1980s. I can’t imagine digitising them would be a high priority for publishers, and there’s no satisfactory way for me to do it myself — no textual counterpart to ripping a CD collection. I have shelves full of sheet music and comic books too, which I doubt would work at all on an e-reader’s screen.

And even if I could reacquire all my books in electronic form, inevitably I’d be expected to pay for them again. I don’t know what that would cost, but I’m pretty sure I couldn’t afford to replace my whole library before it was time to move house again.

Literal translations

Still, I can at least see a transition starting, in the same way it has with music. That’s to say, I haven’t binned my CD collection, but for new music I’ve switched to downloads. For now I still have hundreds of physical little cases taking up space, but at least the collection isn’t growing. And as time goes on I can see myself relying less and less on the physical media, allowing it to wither away to a core of irreplaceable discs. I suspect the switch to eBooks will be a similar process.

When I consider it like this, the features I previously thought of as defining strengths of eBooks – searchability, and an ability to jump between volumes on the move – start to look like incidental bonuses next to their real benefit. That, I now realise, is that they build upon the promise of “the cloud” in freeing us altogether from the burden of physical possessions — a benefit that may seem nebulous, until your house is full of boxes.