From eMule to the bookshelf
For a long time I was a defender of digital media, especially books, magazines, and newspapers, because I valued their convenience and how easy they were to carry around. Today I can see the foundation of this argument, and of all that self-convincing, was the lack of money to go after the books I wanted, the games I longed for, and so many of the other things that make physical media so fascinating.
In a family with very limited means, a luxury such as a current-generation videogame console was impossible to obtain. Even when things began to turn for the better, I was still one generation behind my few wealthier neighbours. But I was always their co-pilot.
That was because I was the kid who, lacking a videogame of his own, compensated for it with kilos upon kilos of magazines about them. Many were quite old, bought from second-hand shops that sold these relics by weight. Yet in the outskirts of my hometown, their intellectual value was indispensable.
On a few rare occasions we had enough money left over to spend on the most peripheral of luxuries: a more up-to-date videogame magazine. That was how I forced my father into becoming friends with the newsman at the kiosk closest to our house, who would set aside at least one or two of the latest issues of whichever videogame magazine happened to be popular at the time so that I could go there and blow my precious allowance on them.
That was how I acquired a few relics that have since been lost and probably ended up in the rubbish. One of them was a special GameCube launch issue, with a silver cover, containing a long feature on the console’s technical specifications and a few walkthroughs for the games released alongside it.
As the years went by, and as both the country’s financial situation and my family’s improved despite a few enormous obstacles, magazines became less attractive and videogames became much more accessible to me. That did not mean we could afford to pay full price for an original PlayStation 2 game. Quite the contrary.
In fact my father, being no fool, came to me to ask which version of the eventual household PS2 would be the best one to buy. And since I was an avid reader of the IT section of the country’s newspaper of record, I quickly turned a weekend trip to the city centre into a mission to buy a “modded” console.
It was by no means my introduction to piracy. By then I was already an eMule and Soulseek rat, along with several other ways of obtaining mostly music over the internet. I became a sort of distribution hub for this material among school friends, who would come to me asking for CDs and DVDs packed with entire discographies of every conceivable kind, from basic pop to the most obscure technical black metal. To make matters “worse” I did all of it for free, purely for the pleasure of being this kind of multimedia oracle.
Time passed and as people learned for themselves how to obtain pirated media easily without intermediaries such as me, my role was lost somewhere in space-time. My own involvement with piracy declined dramatically, with music streaming services being largely to blame.
All of that changed when I found myself interested in books again.
Books in my home country are quite expensive. Attempts at reducing costs through lower import taxes and tax incentives were not enough to encourage the industry to bring prices down to levels that were accessible, at least for anyone outside the upper middle class. It is no coincidence that second-hand book platforms and even physical used-book shops still enjoy a fair degree of success there.
Here on the other side of the Atlantic, the situation is not all that different. But there is simply no comparison between how bad things are on one side and the other.
I started with a Kindle and what became its faithful companion, Calibre. I trawled through the now very well-known Russian-origin websites containing millions of books and even academic papers, looking for works that, in my view, would best prepare me for my master’s degree. The few physical books I still owned from my undergraduate years and wanted to revisit were also pirated and converted into formats better suited to reading on that small self-lit screen.
I will admit that it was extremely useful and saved me a great deal of money. But the intellectual cost was also considerable.
My financial situation has improved greatly since those days, to the point where obtaining books through those well-known corners of the internet no longer makes much sense. I still own a Kindle that could receive thousands of .mobi files at any moment, but it sits unused because the pleasure of a physical book really is unbeatable.
Of course, physical books, especially the cheaper paperbacks I tend to buy during Amazon sales, are not as ergonomic as the Kindle, which has barely been used since arriving in my home. Yet I have to admit that any line of text in front of me is much easier to absorb, and above all much more memorable, when it is actually printed on a piece of paper.
I can obviously have the bad luck of buying a cheaper book with a mediocre typeface, and any scribble I make on its pages will remain there permanently, even if it is only in pencil. It is still an incomparable experience, writing something on a paper page rather than on a terribly formatted PDF.
That does not mean I fail to understand, or even disagree with, my past actions. It was, after all, a case of necessity making the man. Unfortunately when it comes to academic papers, especially for someone outside academia, there is often no way to access them without either having access to almost limitless funds or resorting to these websites of highly questionable origin. Websites which, incidentally, helped feed the AI “monster” that, judging by the way things are going, will eventually exact a very high price from anyone who dared get involved in things such as the stock market in the present day.
Still, and knocking on wood as I say this, I do not see myself changing course. My library is still quite small, and its growth has stalled because my first buying spree led me to purchase around two dozen books, of which only four or five have been read in full so far. Before long, however, I will continue expanding it, much to the misfortune of my increasingly chaotic bookshelf.