While reading some critical essays on the women of the Discworld, I was struck by an urge: I would like to re-read Discworld. All forty books of it. In publication order.
I could probably get them all for free with a minimum of searching. Hell, I might even have them sitting around my computer. And arguably I would not be making any major moral mis-steps by doing this, as I used to own copies of them, purchased one by one as they were written. But it’s not without its toll; I’d have to trawl through various sites that are more interested in serving up ads and viruses, or guiding me to pay memberships, than they are with spreading culture. And the files I’d acquire that way would be of dubious quality – they might be copies of the official e-books, or they might be a badly-OCRed scan of the book, with pages missing, and probably no cover image.
I could also probably get them all as used paperbacks without any significant searching. But I’m loathe to carry physical books on the plane now that I have the iPad; I read fast, and I have no desire to return to humping six or seven books around in my bag just to make sure I have sufficient things to amuse myself during the flight. (I’ve tried to draw on the flight, but laptop plus wacom tablet takes up more space than I can routinely expect to have, and then of course there’s the lack of oxygen as well.)
Or I could spend six bucks apiece on Amazon and be done with it. I like that plan. The time I’d spend hunting down good copies feels worth that.
My time has value to me. Truly, I am an adult now.