Pride, Swinging from Technology's Leash

Ezra Klein:

Bookshelves are not for displaying books you've read -- those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson. I am the type of person who is very interested in a history of the Reformation, but am not, as it happens, the type of person with the time to read 900 pages on the subject. More importantly, I am the type of person who amasses many books, on all sorts of subjects. I'm pretty sure that's what a bookshelf is there to prove. The reading of those books is entirely incidental. The question becomes how we'll project all of this when Kindles takes off and all our books are digital.

In multi-user domains, dude. Or, more likely, on our iWall, which will produce a floor-to-ceiling, touch-and-drag image of our virtual 'bookshelves' in a variety of subtly ironic formats ('50s FBI shelving, The Perk, Oscar Wilde's naughty room). The screen resolution will be better than real life, of course. And when you get tired of looking at all those eternally-embossed-and-unbroken spines you can watch the movie adaptations instead, which, in utopia, will always be better than the book.