As I noted before, we had an unwelcome influx of water in the storage area of the garage where our Stuff is waiting. We think we’ve identified the source, and we’ve taken care of the wet books. We’ve been sorting books into “Glasgow” and “Storage” categories, except that in the middle of the night I realized that we have already assigned just about as many books to “Glasgow” as I had in my Seabury office, and we don’t know how big the office will be, and there is approxiamtely zero room for books in the flat. Ergo, we will probably have to perform another sorting of the books into the categories “Essential” and “Manageable-without.”
This brings to the fore a very prominent aspect of the digital transition in publishing: while “nothing can replace the tangible, sensuous qualities of a book,” there’s a physical limit to the quantity of books that most people can (or should) take on. I have hardly bought any books at all for several years, and we’ve had to cut our library by a third already (and quite possibly more when Margaret moves to Glasgow next year). Print publishers have effectively eliminated me as a customer, because I can’t carry their products around any more. Contrariwise, if I could buy good, usable electronic versions of the books on my list, my eligibility as a consumer would know no practical limits (storage being elastic if not yet infinite).
It appears to me that the non-digitally-hip print publishers operate on the assumption that their customers will have functionally unlimited storage space, an assumption that places severe limits on their market. Even among academics and book-reliant professionals, more and more have to deal with smaller living space and greater mobility — both circumstances militating against the expansive acquisition of published works. Imagine, though, the possibility that a reasonably-priced edition of a big, fat book were available in a PDF-like format, with no DRM restrictions; while some copies would absolutely certainly be shared illegally, the number of viable customers would also increase markedly.
I expect that publishers even in the digital dimension will try to perpetuate the limitations that define physical-dimension publishing — alas, in so doing, they defer the arrival of a vigorous digital marketplace (that will overtake us all willy-nilly) and exchange long-term pounds for short-term pence.
(These observations apply generally as well to some of the projects described in IHE’s article on “Digital — and Financially Viable” ventures. The Stanford Encyclopedia seems to be on a sounder track, and TLG on a path calculated to keep would-be classicists at an arm’s length.)