Today’s post is inspired by my mother, who (unbeknownst to her) raised an interesting question about ebooks. My mother only recently got rid of AOL but has somehow managed to jump immediately to having an iPhone, where – to her delight – she can download ebooks. Just one problem – “What do I do with them after I read them?”

I take after my dad. He doesn’t join Netflix for the same reason I don’t belong to a library – we need to own, and display, the things we love. With him, it’s movies. With me, it’s books. I have lots of them, and give or take the sporadic “do I really need three copies of Pride and Prejudice?” I keep 98% of what I buy or what’s given to me.

I like arranging books on my shelf, being able to look at them, picking up old favorites to re-read, or just  reorganizing my shelves when I’m bored. But mostly I like owning books. For these reasons, I don’t really buy ebooks. I say “really” because I’ve purchased five ebooks in my life, but I don’t see myself buying more if they are also available in print. I have nothing against them and see no difference between reading a book and reading an ebook during the act of reading. My love lies in the books themselves. There are books I have in my apartment right now that I know I won’t read again, but I like knowing they’re there.

But there are those with a less romanticized notion of books. So you tell me, embracers of ebooks, what do you do? If no one can see the physical evidence that you’ve read Thomas Pynchon, do you bother keeping him on your ereader? Can you delete and move on, the way technology does, or do you transfer each ebook to every new ereader because you just can’t let go?