House of Books Gets Meh Reactions on Gizmodo

Via Karen DeCoster, check out all the harumphing comments for this house built around the presence of physical books. Says one commenter:

In the years to come it will seem as absurd as building a house around a collection of 8-track cassettes.

This takes the burrito for worst analogy of the year, seeing as “story quality” is the same on paper as it is on screen.

Another gem of logic:

who the hell has that many books in their personal collection? never heard of a library?

Why is it bad to own a lot of books instead of having to rely on the collection in the care of people you don’t even know?

I don’t mind Kindles or any kind of e-reader, but what I think their main advantage—their portability and their data storage—aren’t enough to kill off physical books for good…especially considering how infrastructure-dependent they are. The power goes, you drop the device just the wrong way, a disgruntled IT tech decides to take a whizz on one of Amazon’s tape drives…all very likely scenarios. Then your Hunger Games trilogy is lost. You buy a book and as long as you keep it above your home’s likely flood levels, it’ll be around for quite some time.

Most people read only a few books at one time, so the appeal of having so many books accessible at once is only good for bookworm bragging rights. I’m not one to waste energy on one-upmanship so that is all lost on me.

I’ve posted my reasons before so at this point I’m repeating myself. Given what Gizmodo’s content is, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at all the poo-pooing of things low-tech.