The shelves are groaning

It's World Book Day today and so it's time for a bookish blip, joining the ranks of blippers who are following this forum post.

At lunchtime I tried to find a book event to photograph, but the central London bookshops seem to be all-out for World Book Night on 5 March. So, since a daylight blip was thwarted, here's one of my bookshelves. This is the one that holds the fiction books. I try to give away the paperbacks I've read, either to charity or to bookcrossers, so that my shelves don't fall down with sheer numbers. However, the problem is that most of the books on these shelves are unread simply because I cannot resist picking up a potential good read. I very rarely buy books from bookshops and most of these titles have come from charity shops or from the pulp shelf at an office I work in. I'm allowed two books a day from there and I have to be extremely strict with myself on what I take home - only books that I really, really want to read make it out of the office. For new books, I tend to visit my library and loan them from there.

On the second shelf down are two books that are crucial to my work - 'Copy-Editing' by Judith Butcher (I know of at least one blipper who will recognise that volume) and the 'Oxford Guide to Style'. I can spend hours quibbling with these two books over hyphenation, commas, capitalization, italicization, and 'z' spellings. I'm extremely grateful that there are sets of rules laid down to obliterate grammar gremlins, although I have to obey publishers' house styles, which sometimes go against what's written in these books. However, rules can be broken - as long as they're consistently broken.

I fell that the book industry is at a turning point, with increasing use of digital book-reading devices and Borders and REDgroup filing for bankruptcy. At one company I work for, the business forecast is for half the products to be print and half to be digital. There's a fair bit of restructuring happening in order to make this work. I'm quite excited by it since I will learn new skills to create these digital products. It could be fun. The printed book is far from gone, though. I think there will always be a place for a paperback.

Here's a song for books.