We packed away most of our books when we moved around the rooms and refinished the floors this summer. Now we’re bringing them out again. And also boxes and more boxes of more books that have been in the basement for about ten years, since we last went through a similar exercise. In total I counted 47 boxes of books.

At that time I thought we gave away a lot of books. But we still chose to keep many that we valued and liked but didn’t actively read or use. Dictionaries, reference works, coffee table books, books we had read and didn’t plan to read again soon.

During these past ten years, many of those books have been made entirely obsolete by the internet. Short of an apocalypse that permanently takes down the whole internet, I cannot imagine a situation where I would go to a physical dictionary to look up the meaning of a word, or an art lexicon to look up a term. If I want to get a quick biography of a composer, I use Wikipedia and not a book. If I want to see an example of Monet’s work, I find it on the internet. If I want to better understand a mathematical formula, I google for a graphical explanation.

Many of these books we will cull and try to give away. But I suspect they may end up in the trash instead. Who in this day and age would be interested in buying them?