It's not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books
Until you find yourself having to move.
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It's really not that bad. The things that are time consuming about moving are packing, disassembling, organizing, reassembling and so on. I own over 1000 books and live on the 5th floor of a building without an elevator, and even so, with 4 people it took us about 5-10 minutes to move the books in. Packing them into boxes took maybe 20 minutes.
Even though by weight it's much lighter the book shelves are a real pain in the ass.
Books pack really easily, and they're solid enough to stack almost anything on the resulting box. It's the random junk that's hard.
I have thousands of books and would love to get rid of them. I would need a future-proof platform that allows annotations, and that lets me migrate between devices (so I can keep my books for at least my lifetime). I guess I would also need a convenient book scanner, for those books that are no longer in print.
I've often wondered why Amazon doesn't have a program like "send in your books, get a free Kindle copy of them"
I think that it's fairly clear why they don't do this --would they do it only for books purchased from amazon.com? If not, would they require some sort of proof of purchase? What about used books? What about books not currently available on the Kindle? If you send them an old edition of a book, then what edition do you get on the Kindle?-- but it's such a gorgeous idea. This has been one of the biggest roadblocks in my attempts to decide whether to buy a Kindle: I have a huge library, and the idea of spending thousands of dollars in format-shifting doesn't appeal to me. If I could even just get a discount for books that I already own, it would make me much, much more likely to take the plunge.
JPGs in PDF form? Both of those formats will be around forever.
I recently scanned a bunch of books using gscan2pdf; it makes it relatively easy, and integrates some decent utilities like Tesseract for OCR. (Some fiddling with controls meant that I could start playing a movie and mechanically flip pages and punch the scan button.)
Relatively high-resolution scans like 3-500 DPI mean you can get big PDFs (~200MB for a big anthology was normal), but this isn't much of a concern to me: I can clean them up later if I really need space, and in an era where 1.5tb is 100$, 200MB is nothing (1 or 2 cents of space?).
Scribbling in the margins of PDFs isn't very easy, and losing the ability to annotate effortlessly is a big loss for many readers.
I believe it's actually pretty easy in e.g. Preview.app on the mac.
so true, they take up a good amount of space and there's not a heck of a lot of air accumulating in that space, just paper and a lot of it.
When I moved from home to college, I really only had 2 or 3 medium boxes of things i wanted/could take with me. Then from college to my first apartment I also had really accumulated nothing of value, and threw away a lot. When I moved from my first apartment to my second, an unbelievable thing happened. My first job brought with it a mountain of stuff. I really didn't realize it as I always kept that place spotlessly tidy (When I start to think through a piece of code I tend to walk around cleaning, its like a mindless activity that helps my mind work) The big mistake I made was using server boxes i swiped from work to move. Next time (which should be in a few months) I plan on using more smaller boxes.
i'm moving to another country in the next weeks. plan was to leave everything behind but the (academic) wife's some thousand books.
I was going to spend some little money on the shipping. Then i found out that the company would pay a ship container and give me hardly any financial support to settle there. So now i'm on full pack rat mode!
...and i can't tell you how nice and easy it was to ship only the some thousand books. Everything else by comparisson is hell. You have to fill some isurance forms on everything. Packaging is a pain. You can't separate a bed into smaller boxes like a shelf of books. Etc