Rereading

I used to reread books out of necessity — English-language spec fic was hard to come by at the time, and I read fast. New books would get acquired, then finished: ding! Next! Nothing? So I reread each book on about an average of once a year.

Now in the land of plenty, I have books on my shelves that I haven't read even once. (The culprit: library book sales, where a quarter will garner me with that title someone recommended but I never bothered to track down, and this way I can pick it up whenever I want…except that I never really wanted to read it in the first place. Someday I will learn and properly hoard my quarters for laundry.) I don't actually own a TV, and the focal point of my living room is a lovely wide bookcase which is devoted to hardcovers and trade paperbacks.

My mass markets have been exiled to quarantine until I'm positive the silverfish manifestation is forever vanquished. This may take a while, as my local farmers market includes a fabulous sorbet stand which constantly stocks my freezer, and I'm hesitant to introduce silverfish to the same habitat as delight. The sorbet is mine! All mine!

Result: I reread my hardcovers more often than my paperbacks, even though I usually read while holding the book in one hand, and this is slightly more straining with a hardcover. It's the same reason particular items get stocked on eye-level shelves. If you notice something more, there's more chance for you to actually pick it up.

The real consequence I've noticed is that I practically never reread my ebooks. Generally I read them when I buy them, and it's never a problem to acquire more. (Or rather, it's a problem that I can acquire more so easily. Certain online bookstores are very friendly with my credit card. Downright intimate, even.) And I don't have them organized at all: they're scattered across four devices, five formats, and countless download folders. So there's nowhere for me to go to just browse through them and rekindle that fond feeling I once felt for certain ones.

Sadly, I'm not particularly motivated to go back through them all, either. Because buying an ebook is often cheap and easy, I have quite a few that I wish I hadn't read once, never mind multiple times. But because I bought them and storage space is bountiful, I never deleted them. So these lumps of coal continue to dwell in my ebook mines.

I'm curious as to how others keep track of their ebooks and whether it differs greatly from how their physical books are treated. My print books are divided by size and nonfiction/fiction, then alphabetized by author; my ebooks are scattered about in approximately the same pattern you'd get after a squirrel learned to operate a BB gun. (At the same time, I'm utterly horrified by people who keep documents on their computer desktops. Go figure.)

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