In this QingMing Jie, one of Chinese traditional holidays, I clean and bag my old books, plan to sell them for a minimal charge.
I posted a thread which expressed my desire on the campus forum and more than half of my old books had been sold in 4 hours. It goes so smoothly because of the books’ high value and their attractive price. But why do I bother to do this ?
Some of the books are actually useless to me. About three years ago, I bought a few books about Art, Drawing, Japanese, which since then had never been touched after I read several pages. I had many ambitious ideas back then, thinking about a lot of possibilities that might happen to get myself to a different level. Now I know that’s over-ambitious and learn to narrow my limited attention to what I really need to do.
Internet and PDAs accelerate the disappearance of paper books. I bought a Kindle before last Spring Festival, and have stayed with it for over two months during which I read over 12 books, the amount that I barely achieved in any half year before. I would never want to lift those large, heavy, bacteria-ful books again.
However, maybe you will say that paper books are more environment-protective. According to a research published by market research company Cleantech Group, kindles can be more environment-protective than traditional paper books. I’m not sure if this is advertorial but as far as I can tell, kindle has made my life easier and more effective.
I’ll still keep some paper books for memorization but they will not be the main battle field any more.