What Ever Happened to Stuff?

I love having stuff. I used to buy CDs and DVDs all the time, and I've got shelves and shelves packed with books. Having stuff looks brilliant: there's no substitute for looking through your collection and having to wade through lots of magical albums that you've completely forgotten owning before finding the right one. But just recently, there doesn't seem much point in having stuff anymore: everything can be found online and saved to a slightly bigger box, so what's the point in having loads of little boxes lying around, taking up room, when all of your entertainment can fit in the palm of your hand? I always thought I'd buy CDs forever, but now it just seems such a poor use of money, and every time you buy a new CD rack it's full straight away anyway and you have to think about getting the next one. I've just always hated the idea of owning something but not actually having it, not having an album cover and liner notes, and a CD that gets scratched and doesn't play properly after a few years. I form a strong emotional attachment to actual 'things' that I don't think I'll ever be able to have for a digital copy. I like that I still have my copy of Weezer's Blue Album with it's crinkled booklet from when a beer bottle cracked in my bag, and that my copy of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless always skips on track four from when my housemate hilariously removed every CD I own from its case. What love can you have for recorded music that doesn't exist physically? You can still love the tunes, but you can't hug them.

Anyway, point being, on Saturday I got an uncontrollable urge to buy some books. I went to Waterstone's and bought Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, London Fields by Martin Amis, and three Philip Marlowe novels by Raymond Chandler. I loved walking around the shop, I loved looking at the books, and I loved carrying them home and putting them in my massive to-read pile. And I'll love seeing the varying degrees of degradation they go through as I read them. I really hope that the nasty e-reader never tricks me into thinking that having shelves and shelves of books and spending money on them is a waste of time and resources, because if it ever does I'll be a shell of a person. I'm not as staunchly against e-readers as I used to be when I thought they were devil spawn (the halcyon days of a few weeks ago) but I just can't ever see myself not wanting to read real books. The feel of them, the weight of them, the fact that the image of somebody sat quietly reading, under a tree or something, could come from any point in human history (if you include hand-scribed books). Books have always been a part of me, and that rasping yearning for childhood that I feel when innocence further slips from my grasp could be made a permanent feeling if they disappear. And if e-readers really have to be everywhere, can they invent ones where the back of the thing morphs into the front cover of the book, so I know what people are reading on the train, please?