I love books. Perhaps one of the signs that my marriage was in trouble was when my wife relegated our hundreds of books to the shed. And yes, I carried them out there. The rain broke through and many of the books were spoiled to the point of destruction. That was not a metaphor for my marriage, real books were harmed.
And now I am all schizophrenic about my part in the eradication of the book. Within 2 or 3 generations, paper books will go the way of the vinyl record. There will be specialists and collectors but the mass consumption of words will be digital. Probably in some way not even imagined by us today. My books are only available on the iPad where they look beautiful and have behaviours that you cannot get in print. I sacrificed the joy of a physical book for electronic functionality. In actual fact I would not have been able to publish "In 1876: Bananas & Custer" in print; it is 2,000 pages with 1,000 mostly colour or colorised images. Nobody would want to print or carry a book like that. The digital format makes it easy to flick through the pages and skip around the bite-sized chunks you want. And the illustrations look gorgeous on a back-lit screen.
It is the independent book sellers that I feel I have betrayed most. Before I wrote my book I had done some Amazon shopping and then saw a local bookstore fail. I changed my shopping habits and ordered new books from brick bookshops - though I started using eBay and Abebooks for old books for research. Now my book cannot be sold in a proper bookstore, just in the difficult-to-fathom Apple iBookstore. I have left real shelves. It is so difficult for a reader to wander Apple's electronic bookcases and come across my book.
The second hand books I bought included first editions of some of the works that were first written/published or were topical in 1876. One had a great story: my copy of the 5th edition of "The Unseen Universe" had a sticker in the front saying it was the property of Isabella L. Bishop, and had been given to H.A. Bird with an address of Tobermory, Mull and a date of October 19th 1876, both written by hand. Google the names and you find H.A. was sister to Isabella and H.A.'s book likely passed in to Isabella's hands when H.A. passed away from typhoid. Isabella Bird is known as a famous travel writer and the donor of the clock that stands in Tobermory as a memorial to her sister.
I have rescued the remaining books from the shelf; the marriage was not so lucky. At some point I will have to go through them and find the memorabilia that has occasionally been left between the pages as book marks. I know there are dollars and Scottish pound notes in there somewhere. Hopefully not in the ones that were mangled by damp. The Scottish notes may soon be necessary for visits abroad up north. I am not sure that I have left any bacon or diamonds in my books, not like in these stories:
http://www.abebooks.co.uk/docs/Community/Featured/found-in-books.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-U140717-h00-insideAM-141211HV-_-01cta&abersp=1
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