Viewers of some of my past PADs will know that I've switched almost exclusively to digital books in the last few months. For the price of a takeaway lunch you can access new ideas without cluttering one extra millimetre of your shelf space. O'Reilly Media in particular send out "Deal of the Day" e-mails with serious cuts to their already reasonable (in my view) prices, and I've been tempted by a few.

(Edit from 10 years into the future (2022): This, from 29 June 2017: "Things are changing at the O'Reilly online shop—as of today, we are no longer selling individual books and videos via shop.oreilly.com." Supposedly the books that we bought would "still be available", though a couple of years after that we were told that we needed to download everything or lose access to it, though I can't find that e-mail. In addition I would not pay one red cent that might make its way back to Tim O'Reilly any longer, but that hasn't changed my view of digital reading as I discuss below.)

The latest was a book by Richard Banks titled The Future Of Looking Back. It deals with, for want of a better term, "personal archaeology". That is, the things which we retain because they matter to us, the things that we pass on to others for the same reason, and of course the transition of many of those things from the physical (such as photo albums) to the digital. The book isn't all that long, nor is it exceptionally deep and profound. A lot of the ideas are intuitively obvious and yet it remains an interesting read because seldom does someone take the time to bring all of those threads of thought together (and to consider the implications of the new digital and disposable society, where there are likely to be fewer physical artefacts anyway) in pursuit of the question "What's the future of reminiscing?" Not only reminiscing about our own history, but of those who precede us.

I'm in an unusual position in that I have no family history, nor have I ever craved one. Nor, indeed, do I seek to recall every detail of my own past. But there are bits and pieces here and there that I'd like to hold onto. For the last couple of decades I've been fortunate enough to live alone in a 2 bedroom unit which, while not allowing me to have Boxers, still afforded me a certain latitude in how much "physical archaeology", mostly in the form of papers and documents, I could keep.

In the foreseeable future, if a certain bank stops jerking us around, I'll be moving to a place which is more space-constrained (larger overall, but shared) and so I've undertaken a project to digitise what I want to keep. (Which also explains why I haven't had a lot of time to spend on PBase lately, though I have a photo for each day and will toss the lot up in due course.) The project is not, however, to be done on my old HP scanner shown here, which takes around one minute per page. I'd still be scanning my first filing cabinet in 2025 at that rate. No, a new one is about to arrive, and I'll come back to that later.

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