books for babies

[metaphortunate]

Oh, bookstores. We've had some good times together, you and I, haven't we? Half Price Books in Houston, I remember so many long afternoons spent hidden in your stacks reading and rereading your strangely complete Dykes To Watch Out For collection. I apologize for never buying a one of them, but I was still living at home; books about lesbians were not really something I could have owned back then. God knows I bought plenty of other books from you, though. Stars Our Destination in Chicago, how I remember the long ride up to the north side of the city to go to my first Friends of Lulu meeting in you. I remember musing on the message of the change Alice Bentley had made to the title of Bester's book. Dear bookstores. I will miss you when you go. Stars Our Destination is gone already. Dreamhaven is barely open. Alan Beatts of Borderlands sees the writing on the wall.

But I know you are going, dear bookstores, because no one loves you more than me, and even for me, the one and only reason at this point why I ever shell out extra cash and storage space for a physical book over an e-book is the Junebug.

The Junebug is why I sometimes grit my teeth and close my Kindle window and resign myself to not reading a book until that day maybe weeks or months from now until I find the time to get by a bookstore - if the bookstore even has the book I want, which it probably won't, and Amazon temptingly always does, literally 90 seconds away. See, I grew up in a forest of books. My parents' books surrounded me on all sides. There were the books I picked out from the library, sure, and occasionally even from bookstores, but there were also the ones that I never, ever would have chosen for myself, yet I read them and read them and learned so much because they were right there, in my bedroom, whenever I was bored. Ralph Waldo Emerson. The complete works of Lewis Carroll and the collected stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. The complete works of Oscar Wilde. David Copperfield. John Holt. 500 old copies of National Geographic. I never would have chosen them for myself. If I had had to ask my parents to borrow them, I probably wouldn't have: how could I have justified it? I didn't have a reason, I didn't really know what I was reading, if god forbid there were any SEX in the book and my parents had asked me why I was reading it I would have died of modesty. But there was no barrier to entry for these books, none at all. And so I was rich.

How can I make that happen for the Junebug with e-books? I need a way. ("Never buy anything with DRM on it" is not a realistic way.)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I know, right? If not for the neighbor who had everything you ever wanted to know about we'd but were afraid to ask at what they thought was a kid safe height, well then.

[kalmn]

Dammit that was me.

[metaphortunate]

Oh right! Friends' houses! How many adults' parties did I spend hiding from the other kids in the basement with a book I took off their shelves. What's the Junebug gonna do? :(

[kalmn]

Somehow the word sex fell out of my comment!

[cahn]

I always figured I'd buy E another kindle and link it to my account (which is already linked to my sister's), and thereby give her access to all the books my sister and I have bought over the years. (It's already pretty cool to be able to instantly trade books between me and my sister even though she lives halfway across the country from me.) And load it with a bunch of Gutenberg to boot, so she can have anything in the public domain (which I would have killed for as a child, my parents didn't believe in that kind of riches). And say nothing at all if I happened to notice that the "most recent read" had sexually explicit Stuff in it.

(Though there was some entertainment value in scouring my mom's room to find where she'd hidden her romance novels, when I was really bored. :) )

But I really like paper books. They're harder to read than e-books, but I like them more, and so I try to buy them when I can anyway, even though we keep running out of shelf space.

[kate_nepveu]

Removing DRM from ebooks takes a minor amount of setup and then is painless.

http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/calibre-plugins-the-simplest-option-for-removing-most-ebook-drm/

[metaphortunate]

Yeah, I knew there must be a way. How do I make them freely available to the child, though? And *browseable*? Hmm. Central family server, maybe...

[kate_nepveu]

Calibre also acts as a content server! There're multiple Android ereaders that will connect and browse. And by the time he's older I'm sure there will be other options.

[veejane]

I identify very strongly with book-as-object. Not only because I picked out books from my mother's shelves at random*, but because so many of them were acid-paper paperbacks, doomed to delicacy, and that informed how I read them and how I treated them. When I got into my mid-20s and had some disposable income, I replaced a bunch of my dilapidated paperbacks with glossy new hardcovers, but not all. Brat Farrar is still a sad little broken-spined thing, held together by a sparkly gold ponytail holder circa 1989. I read it very carefully.

I also don't have a handle on how inheritance would work in ebooks. I have many books with inscriptions, in handwriting, that commemorate the giver, recipient, and event of the giving. Some of these came to me, and I've already passed them on to niecephews. Some of them came to kin of mine, and I'm keeping them for future generations. The physicality of that, the fact that my grandmother's Latin-English dictionary circa 1920 is her copy, not anybody else's copy, though yea it be old and currently wrapped in Saran Wrap for safekeeping -- I don't yet understand how/whether that will translate to digital format.

(*And while we're providing Titles We Discovered By Chance, Possibly in Secret, memorable choices included a collection of Anais Nin short stories -- terrible all of them, and very exciting even so --, the first 100 pages of East of Eden, and Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts.)

[pantryslut]

Have you seen my house lately?

[badgerbag]

You will have a small but brilliant selection of odd books! And you will go to the library :D

[khedron]

And how many parties did you attend as an adult where you accidentally fell into a book? ;-)

[metaphortunate]

Ugh. Embarrassingly many. :)

[metaphortunate]

I don't. I really don't. Unless they have illustrations. At this point, they're just not the superior technology for getting text into my brain.

[khedron]

Not embarrassed! I still love seeing what's on people's shelves, and will miss that when shelves are virtualized. It's just so much harder to walk into someone's house and borrow an e-book.

(I know, I know, they'll be easy to borrow on virtual visits. Bah.)

[snarp]

I second the linked-Kindles idea (or whatever equivalent will exist when he's old enough to do much reading). That's how Mom is currently training Dad to read stuff other than The Onion. She got him a Kindle linked to her account and loaded all her stuff except the smutty fanfic onto it. If it works for Dad, it will probably also work for a small child.

...actually, if you've got a family computer used by everyone, he might someday start using your history/bookmarks as a resource. I think that may be how my siblings and I discovered fanfic. MOM WHY WEREN'T YOU MORE CAREFUL LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE TO US.

[lovepeaceohana]

I feel like I have not adequately thought this out - I've always been the reader in my family, the book-collector, and now that I am grown and married to a partner who came with his own library, we have begun to prune, and prune, because we are renters and physical books are so heavy. And yet we keep buying more picture books for the kids, because picture books are beautiful, and I find that what I'm actually doing is just recreating the library of titles I remember from childhood and adding ones I wish I'd had. I guess I'm hoping they'll just get used to the feel of paper in their hands and the reading of words from paper and get into it that way? I have so many books that I've saved or purchased anew that I loved at various ages throughout my life that I can't wait to pass on to them, it'd be a shame to lose them to e-versions (if those even exist for some of the titles!).

[rosefox]

Libraries! Eccentric friends who collect print books!

[dr_memory]

Ugh, I am so very there with you on all of this. Half the reason I haven't just donated 80% of my physical books to the SF Public Library is that I want Theda to be able to browse them.

I'm also maintaining a personal stash of free/*cough*/liberated ebooks, but as much as I prefer ebooks for reading, they are just total crap for browsing, so I don't know what to do about that.

from Harimad

[(Anonymous)]

So, so true. I often forget to add that to my list of secondary reasons not to like e-books: can't casually browse someone else's shelves.

[wired]

We bought Baz a Kindle, and once in a while I unlock some of my things and load it onto his. I regularly unlock anything I have bought with DRM and then archive it. I am teaching my parents to do the same.

As for the browsing and friends, that is is what I am using Goodreads for. I love seeing what my friends have read and what they aspire to read.

We will always have books. I am just trying to keep it down to "books I would want to own at the end of the world, books I read in the bath (although a ziploc solves much of that, books I want the kids to find, and books better in paper (craft and cookbooks and picture books and poetry)"