What is the most visual sign of an intellectual? For many people, the answer may be an obvious one. The person must be well-read. And what better proof is there of a person being well-read than having a study full of bookshelves, completely filled up with good books? It is unsurprising than, whenever the average media outlet go conduct a face-to-face interview with scholars, professors, and experts, they are often conducted in their offices, flanked by bookshelves full of books related to the topics at hand and the person's field of expertise. Having many books has become equated with knowledge.
There is no denying that many of the world's most knowledgeable people happen to be well-read. The average academic, when writing their papers and treatises, need to consult and review hundreds of other academic works, many of which are in the form of books. For these works of references to be useful, it is best if they are in the printed form (rather than in ebook format), tagged in different pages for most prominent instances of arguments and viewpoints. The academic, then, can just grab the book off the shelf and flip to relevant pages as if an encyclopedia.
While such ability to flexibly organize and access literary knowledge is undoubtedly deserving of the utmost respect, it also leads to the question of just how a person might manage to collect and store that many books in one place. To keep a collection organized, one would need a large room with many bookshelves, and one has to ensure that one remain relatively stationary, as moving dozens of heavy books, not to mention bookshelves, would certainly not be conducive to ensuring the books remain organized and relatively suitable conditions. To put succinctly, keeping many books require a good amount of real estate.
For many mobile people (like myself), such real estate is not the easiest to acquire. Getting a big office or study with enough space to store dozens of books generally means one has to go buy a big house or work for an organization for enough years to warrant the employer supplying a massive office. Neither is likely if one chooses to hop around the world, living and working in different places for different employers. In these people's minds, the ability to move quickly greatly outweigh the need to develop semipermanent loyalty to a place or employer.
Even if one is lucky enough to live in a rented house of massive size (as I have done in Iringa), or temporarily work an employer that does offer large offices with many empty bookshelves, one is unlikely to see buying many books as a worthy investment. Books, as noted above, are heavy and cumbersome to transport. If one has great affinity to move across countries and continents at a whim, then books purchased are much more likely to end up in the trash can than in the checked luggage. It makes every sense for the person to keep physical possessions minimal, and books are certainly not the most pivotal physical possessions.
In this line of logic, then, the idea of buying and storing physical books in large quantities, even just for research purposes, also become a sign of materialistic comfort, much in the same way one would consider buying a house, a car, or bulky home appliances. Without the financial capacity to pay for the real estate to store the books, as well as the money to maintain and enlarge the book collection, one simply cannot accumulate enough of them to conduct thorough research even in one particular subject matter. The acquisition of knowledge is assigned a monetary cost.
But one can argue that the concept of buying physical books is obsolete in the first place. One can use ebooks, public library, and most of all, databases on the Internet, to access the same books, often at no cost. Yet such argument simply ignores or internalizes the cost of public goods needed to ensure free access of knowledge. Good libraries require construction, maintenance, constant purchase of new books, and labor, none of which is free or is available universally. Devices to read ebooks are not free, and require good Internet, another public good that is not universal.
The sad reality is that acquiring knowledge is expensive even with development of the Internet. The replacement of having to buy a bunch of books to be stored and organized on bookshelves is to outsource the whole process to online or physical databases elsewhere. Yet, for many people located in more underdeveloped corners of the world, such third-party databases is often inaccessible even if it is nominally free (like Wikipedia). Ultimately, the very idea of acquiring knowledge through books, owned or borrowed, require certain amounts of material prosperity that is available to only some financially well-off people in the world.
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