The Library In “The Cloud”

At a very young age, my parents instilled in me a love for reading. While I’ve mentioned that there were many trade-offs of growing up as a military dependent, reading only recently occurred to me. We moved a number of times during my formative years and had no permanent home. I spent more than half of my first 15 years in Europe.

Television was not new, but it was expensive and not deemed necessary by the Department of Defense, so while they would ship one of those old, heavy, fragile sets, the choice of stations was very limited. In West Germany, you could watch TV, but it was all “auf Deutsch” (in German) and limited to a couple of stations. Admittedly, watching “Mr. Ed” speak German to Wilbur was rather entertaining! So listening to records (those round, flat, literally groovy things that preceded CDs), to AFN (Armed Forces Network) radio, going to the US military movie theaters, and reading, were the entertainment sources. The military did provide well-stocked libraries.

The concept of a personal library also wasn’t new – we just couldn’t afford the weight involved. The military limits the weight of “household goods” they will ship depending upon several factors. Beyond that, you pay for the shipments, so things like furniture, clothing and cookware take priority. Even though they store what isn’t shipped, there are weight limits to that as well. The one thing that a lot of military families shipped, in terms of books, was a set of encyclopedias just in case their new assignment didn’t have a good, convenient library.

A number of years ago, I developed a friendship with a missionary, William. He was maybe 10 years older than me, so their children were grown and on their own. William traveled around the country preaching and raising money for the work with his wife, Ginny. Over the years, they had several large travel trailers towed by a big pickup truck. They would park in one place for a couple of months and visit a number of churches within a reasonable driving distance. They would then return a couple of years later to give progress reports. Like most preachers, William felt that he needed a good set of reference books. Initially, he stored a few hundred pounds of them in waterproof containers in the bed of the pickup under the camper shell – before they bought a 5^th-wheel trailer.

One of the things we had in common was the use of Macintosh computers. He kept sermons, notes, writings and some reference materials on his Mac. At my urging, he began to explore scanning and digitizing his reference materials to save weight and prevent potential damage to some of his rare, out-of-print books. Several years later, as scanners dropped in price, he had put most of the physical library into secure storage. Back then, his digital storage options were CDs, diskettes, and hard drives. Unfortunately, before the advent of high-capacity flash drives and micro-SD cards, he succumbed to esophageal cancer and I lost a good friend…

When I travel, especially for more than a day or two, I like to have a good source of reading materials. As a result, I have put much into my phone, tablet and notebook computer memory. In addition, even more is onto flash drives and especially, micro-SD cards. It is amazing how extensive your “library” can be on just one or two cards – and you can easily have multiple backups.

My preference is Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format. The reason is simple – it is about as universal as it gets for materials that include more than plain text. I settled on that almost exclusively after having a bad experience with a source that uses a proprietary format. (I do use Nook and Kindle, but very circumspectly – even though they were not the problem company.)

For years there has also been a push to keep your library in “the cloud” for access by any device from anywhere – but I remain a little skeptical. In my younger days I could go to the library on base and check out a book. But when we were re-assigned, it had to be returned whether or not I was still reading it. Of course, when we got settled at our new location, often nearly two months later, I could usually check out another copy of the same book and finish it, but they were not always available. I also couldn’t read it during the travel time. Currently experiencing some kind of complete internet blackout at my house makes it even more similar – no television, no home phone, and no access to anything I have stored in the cloud. Well, I can go 4G, but I don’t have unlimited data so “shipping” that library becomes too “heavy” and thus expensive. I’m glad my personal digital library is stored on personal media. I can afford to ship that…