As a book want-to-be-hoarder without enough room to actually do so, these stories always make me sad - I spent alot of time in quiet, cool empty libraries picking up random books as a child.

OTOH - I personally don't have enough room for real books, so everything I have is digital on a NAS. It's there, but "not the same".

Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, through a destructive process...

Digitalization through a destructive process is what was used to train or future overlords.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...

You can get the 8-bay Synology, with its two expansion chassis that's room for about eighteen 24tb drives. Anna's Archive, Libgen, and archive.org provide enough bandwidth that your problem becomes even knowing what titles to download. For the first year or so, you have big long lists of things you know you must have, but even though you didn't quite write them all out (often you just jot down "everything by [author's name]" you eventually finish that up. You start grabbing every book title/cover you see anywhere... and though I'm not particularly proud of it, 4chan often outperforms HN (and though no one would believe it, most of those aren't Mein Kampf).

Really, we need a gigantic bibliography project of some sort. These 2648 titles are the core computer science bibliography would be a big help. Or these 17,852 titles are the core 1970s harlequin romance novels.

>Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, t

He wasn't able to predict that they'd just shred the books without bothering to digitize them though.