(Blast it....lurk mode off....first time too....)

Why? In my case because books and magazines are to easy to lose. They can be lost to accident, misplacement, wear or need. The last major loss for me was due to need.

Due to a lifestyle change I had to get rid of most of the things I had collected. Some were sold, some were given away, some small amount stored. The most painful thing was the book situation. Three pickup loads of them that didn't get stored (mostly paperbacks and reference). Bookstores wouldn't take them, charity orgs didn't want them, libraries couldn't have them without approval. Since this was before the network neighborhood of the internet today there was only one option left.

Three truckloads of books into the county landfill. (It still twinges me thinking about it 15 years later.) Most of which are hard or impossible to find now. Sometimes I will find myself looking for a book I know I have, I remember having read it, and then it strikes me that it was one of those left to burn all those years ago.

Now? Books are still a part of my life and slowly becoming a large part again (just picked up 4 hardbacks this week alone) but space is always a premium. Not all of us have large rooms (or even small rooms) to devote to the space books can take up and so we have to be more particular than we like.

Digital solves most of that situation. They take up basically no room, can be safeguarded onto a small medium for storage or transport (try and do that with 12 bookcases), are almost always available (in todays generally industrialized world) and because one of the greatest problem with physical books (space used) is not present there is no need to get rid of older volumes due to moving or just to make way for newer volumes. This means that chances are good that if you remember reading it earlier, you still have it available to use as reference or read again.

But then, this type of reason also is only of primary concern to those who view the book as a carrier of information and entertainment and not as a decoration or "occasional event" (as in "I just read a good book over the last couple months").

Physical books still find their way onto the shelves of the bookcase at home but thanks to the non-physical format I can be more selective about which ones are good enough to take up the space while maintaining a horribly decadent reading volume, a huge library readily available for entertainment and education, and the ability to take almost all of it with me from now on.

Or we can use the answer one of the kids gave me when they came over to read: "Why not keep them? It's not like they got to be dusted."