Roger Ebert may not yet have his voice back, but since his thyroid cancer surgery left him mute he has been blogging the hell out of the internet. If you haven’t been following his blog at the Chicago Sun-Times, or at least passing through every so often to catch up, he has been penning some really incredible posts not just about movies but about life in general. About a week ago, he published a great piece called Books Do Furnish a Life concerning his near-obsession with collecting books despite the fact that he may never read them again. We’re with you, Roger.

He speaks of a minimalism he enjoyed in his youth, a minimalism that has escaped him since he has aged, become successful, lived a full life. He yearns to return to that minimalism, but realizes that his massive library refuses to let him. He posits that maybe he could live with only a handpicked 200 books… but then, what if he needed one of the others?

We have to accept that books are moving into the digital age, just as music has. The Kindle may take over mainstream book media consumption as the iPod did with music. But vinyl never truly died with the advent of CDs and mp3s, and books will live on in the face of the e-reader. Too many people love having their own library to look through, amassing a collection of ephemera that can be traced to specific moments and feelings in their lives. Sure, even the most ardent bibliophile may keep a library of thousands on their Kindle. But may they never give up the paperback. A reader’s home library isn’t just a needless collection of dead trees that will, in time, wilt into ash. It is a personal history, a reminder of who we are and who we may become. And having shelves overflowing with books looks pretty cool, too.