Where do you get your books? And so you purchase, borrow, or both?

[Jeebo]

31. I buy them.

Mostly from Barnes & Noble, which has a store in the local mall, and expensive leather-bound books from Easton Press. I am a subscriber to their Masterpieces of Science Fiction series, and also every once in a while there's a really expensive signed Easton Press edition that I can neither afford nor resist. I really like the heft of a well-made book. I'm having the same problem you're having in terms of space to store them all, but I only have hundreds, not thousands. If you have that many books, I'll bet you have some valuable ones. I have some that are worth hundreds of dollars now, judging from the prices I see on antiquarian bookseller sites.

I'm thinking of an essay I read 30 or 40 years ago, by Isaac Asimov, in the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. He was talking about the then-current technology of eight-tracks and LPs and tape cassettes. He started musing about future technological improvements that would approach what he envisioned as "the perfect cassette". What would the attributes of the perfect cassette be? He started imagining what those attributes would be. The perfect cassette would play back what you're reading at your exact speed, for example. People read at different speeds, but your perfect cassette would match your reading speed exactly, whatever that speed is for you personally. The perfect cassette also would require no energy of any kind. No batteries, no power cords, it would run on its own limitless and inexhaustible power supply. It would stop when you stopped looking at it and start up again when you looked back at it. He went on and on, imagining the attributes of the perfect cassette and describing those attributes for his readers.

And then, he sprang his surprise on his readers. Dear readers, when do you suppose the perfect cassette will be invented? Surprise, it already has been invented. In fact, it was invented thousands of years ago. It's called a book.

I have tried to find that essay online, but without success. I would love to read it again.

-- Ron