Rare books offer information at hand — no buttons to push
After reading the prompt, I became really interested in learning how people track down rare or historic books. I came across an article on a women who finds rare books for people who love to read historic books on a specific subject. What I found out was extremely interesting. The women actually tracks down these books through the internet. I found it extremely interesting that someone who makes a livelihood entirely through selling hard copies of books actually buys them over the internet. It makes me think about how the internet has really enhanced the sale of hard copy books as well as hinder the sell of books through e-books.
As I thought about the concept of tracking down rare books a little more closely, I realized this is a great example of how hard copies of books are so important to the book market. Electronic books allow for there to be as many copies of book we want there to be at any given time. However with published hard copies of books, there will only be a certain amount of books from the time period the book was first published making the economic worth of the book sky rocket with time. However, electronic books will never really be worth an individual value because they come on devices that hold many other books and information, therefore they lose the same individuality that written and bound books have because they have no unique characteristics setting them apart.
In a way, that does seem ironic. Rather than simply use the internet to find and read a digital copy of a book, the opposite is done. Not only does she not look for digital copies, but she also actually buys the book, and that is impressive. On the other hand, in order to obtain a book by the internet, the only way would be to buy one. For e-books, rather than selling them, it is significantly easier to simply distribute them which in turn impacts the e-book market. It really does create a perfect irony.
Whats even more amazing is how people found rare books before the advent of the internet. You would physically have to go these places and scavenge around for books. It makes you really appreciate how lucky Lafayette is to have all the rare books we do.