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By David Rothman

greatgatsbycover3 A bespectacled party guest in The Great Gatsby marvels over the books in Jay Gatsby’s  library, perhaps a little sarcastically: “Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard.” Holding up Volume One of the Stoddard Lectures, he “cries triumphantly”: “See! It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

Now the Los Angeles Times is out with a story on home libraries and ways to show off titles—ideally real, though you can never be certain these days. Ah, books as decorations! Many of my favorite titles don’t exist in my personal library other than as electrons, and I’m too busy with writing projects to offer a reading list here or at a site like LibraryThing, even though I may in the future. I’d rather spend my limited spare time actually reading (now playing on my XO screen: Beautiful Children). Even so, I can understand the urge to let books serve as social objects, at least virtually, and I like LibraryThing’s use of books as ways to connect people with similar interests.

The big-screen TV angle

But how about Real Life, offline? What to do about friends who visit your home rather than running across you on the Net? Well, here’s a suggestion for both the publishing and consumer electronics industries. Suppose big-screen televisions could display covers of e-books you’ve read, and maybe p-books, too?

What if the right standards existed for televisions to be able to pick up the data from consumers purchases and, I’d hope, from downloads from public domain archives, or mentions on sites such as LibraryThing? And in the case of computers powering big, wall-mounted screens as Apple hopes, what if visitors could click on titles, preview the books via large “print” on the high-resolution displays, and maybe receive ordering information by e-mail—perhaps with small commissions paid to their hosts, if they followed through? No, I don’t own a large-screen TV, but perhaps those who do can fill us in on some possibilities for the future. I’m not expecting this to happen tomorrow. But then again, I can remember when the basic idea of e-books and massive e-libraries seemed wacky.

Related: Wikipedia on John Lawson Stoddard, plus Gutenberg and Google Books links. Stoddard was a travel writer who also wrote on religious topics. As for David Belasco, he was a legendary Broadway producer—and what were Gatsby’s parties and life if not good theater?

(L.A. Times story via LIS News.)

 
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