The Traveller’s Antilibrary

Oh this is a brilliant concept (EDIT: An updated post here at Zenpundit) that Münzenberg picked up and got me thinking. I have a small stack of to-read books but it has remained small because I am often on the road. When I was younger a personal library seemed a worthy goal, but considering the moving I do from country to country it is just not practical. I have a few dozen books that I have hauled back and forth overseas, plus a few dozen more in the basements of friends and parents all over Canada that I plan on consolidating one day. But for an itinerant like me, an Umberto-esque library is not possible.

The digitization of information and organizational power of the internet are extremely helpful in this regard. For one thing my personal library includes tons digital (pdf) and audio books on my that are in various read/un-read states. PDF management and annotation software has been a huge boon for my personal research. Reading on screen is still a pain, granted. If I lived in the US I would absolutely own a Kindle.

My antilibrary basically consists of my Amazon wishlist. Applications like Shelfari help to keep track of books that I have borrowed and read, or plan on reading in addition to the books I actually own. The only problem is that at least with a dead tree system shelf space is limited. Digital antilibraries have infinite potentiality and thus infinite menace.