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Shelved


books.JPGDon’t look now, but Apple—the quirky computer company of the 1980s, the one that always played nebbish outsider to Microsoft’s football jock in the 1990s—is now the most valuable company in the United States. As of Wednesday’s stock market close, Apple is worth an estimated $337 billion—surpassing old champ Exxon by a mere $6,000,000,000, give or take.

In some ways, we can see Apple’s rise as symbolic of the Internet age in which we live, moving past the oil-driven 20th century and into the binary 21st. But even though I’ve long been a fan of almost all things Apple, giving plenty of disposable income to the company over the years, there was a part of me—a little teeny part, wedged somewhere in the left lobe of my cerebrum—that made me a little sad. Because Apple, more than any other company, has been responsible for the death of the personal library.

When I say “library,” I’m talking media library—books, DVDs, CDs, all that stuff. And in many households these libraries seem to be going away.

Back in the day, most everyone I knew wore their hearts on their shelves. I could go into someone’s room and flip through their CDs, peruse their book spines and somehow understand their owners a little more. A Duran Duran fan would likely see the world a little differently than a Judas Priest listener. Someone whose bookshelves were stuffed with Charles Dickens or Emily Bronte would be a different sort of conversationalist than the guy who stored several “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. Even now, I enjoy looking at the sorts of books my friends are reading: Chances are, if they have many of the same books I do, I might enjoy some of the titles they have with which I’m unfamiliar. The entertainment we consume can serve, albeit imperfectly, as personality shorthand.

Not many people keep a pile of CDs around anymore. Most folks store their music on iPods or other MP3 devices now—certainly a tidier way to keep our tunes, but not nearly as revelatory for the casual visitor. I hear that DVDs are on the way out too, as more and more folks gravitate toward on-demand streaming video. Even the book—a media delivery mode that’s been going strong for centuries—is under assault from a multitude of e-readers: The Kindle. The Nook. The iPad. Amazon reports it’s now selling more digital books than hardcovers.

I’m not knocking all this nifty technology. I love the fact that I can take my music library along with me during a run. But even so, I still value the physical presence of the stuff we read and watch and listen to: It can tell folks a little bit about me. It can spark conversation. It can be reminders, of a sort, of days gone by. The sight of a Simon & Garfunkel album reminds me of high school, believe it or not; Level 42 whisks me back to college. It’s not just the music that does this to me: It’s the physical CD case itself.

And there’s something extra-special about books—the way they look and feel and smell. I have shelves and shelves of books. The ones that I’ve read are, in a strange way, a part of me.

Hey, I like e-readers. I have one. But as nifty as they are, or as cool as Apple or other companies may make them in the future, I can’t forsee a day when I go totally digital and throw these space-eating relics into the crawlspace. You can have my books when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.