I set myself a reminder for today, to note that this is the fifteenth anniversary of this booklog. Okay, yes, I’ve sometimes been… less than timely with updates (like, oh, all of 2012); but I never gave up on it, and it’s still the complete record of every book I’ve read over this past decade and a half. If my counts are right, it’s 1,041 books in 512 entries. It’s kind of amazing to me that I’ve been that persistent with it; and it’s even more amazing when I think about what’s changed during that time.
For instance: The very definition of what a “book” is. In 2002, every book I read was printed on paper, and the idea of an “e-book” seemed off in the distant science-fictional future. I had shelves and shelves full of printed books (at one point peaking at over 2500 books stored on an absurd number of bookcases). By late 2010, I was reading on a Kindle. These days, I read books on my phone and tablet (using the ugly-but-functional Moon+ Reader app), only have like a dozen printed books left, and even a Kindle seems dated and old-fashioned.
And, slightly delayed, the same transition came to comic books. If you look back, you’ll see an absolute ton of comics logged up through 2010; I used to buy them in collected “graphic novel” form, and log them that way. Not too long after that, though, it became apparent to me that I’d be reading them all on a tablet in the future, so I quit buying the paper ones. These days, I stay current-ish on Marvel comics through the superb Marvel Unlimited service, where I can read literally every comic they publish for one flat fee. But I don’t booklog them anymore, because they’re not really discrete units of reading in the way that the old bound collections were. (I should maybe think up a way to write them up, though, because I’ve got 5-6 years’ worth of comics that I’ve never said a word about here, and evidence suggests that if I don’t write them up somehow, I’ll completely forget about them.)
On the technology side, the booklog has gone through four complete rewrites with different technologies—partly because I use it as a playground for learning new things, and partly because fifteen years is forever on the web. For context, when this booklog started, Internet Explorer 6.0 was brand-new, and its competition was Netscape 4.7; Mozilla hadn’t yet released its browser, and neither Safari nor Chrome existed. RSS 2.0 hadn’t even been invented yet, and I didn’t get around to adding an RSS feed until 2005.
So, yeah, fifteen years is a long time; this might be the only thing I’ve been consistently doing for that long. With any luck, we’ll all still be here in another fifteen years.
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