I've just been reading Clive Thompson's Smarter Than You Think and was on the passage about Total Recall and that made me think about how ebooks and related technologies are having the impact of remembering on me. I've been using LibraryThing for a while, and while initially it took a long time to get my print collection in, it isn't much of an effort to add a book or two a week. But now when I'm trying to remember something that I've read, I'll usually turn to my LibraryThing page to see if I can remember from the cover of the book where it came from, or as the books have been added (usually) my reading order, I can go back in time to see what I was remembering when - such as knowing I read it when I was visiting Denver. The point being is that my LibraryThing account is my Total Recall of what I'm reading. If I read a library book, it goes in the collection, if I read a free Kindle book, it goes in the collection, and if I listen to an audiobook, it goes in the collection. Whereupon finding about what I've read, looking for information, reading patterns, or just remembering has become much easier, even easier than having those books on the shelves - after all my shelves don't get to keep those library books. I often think about, but can't remember the titles that I read from the public library when I lived in St. Croix, those to me are books lost in time. And I find it much easier to remember the ebooks I've read by listing them this way, as I don't have a stack to look at to jog my memory. So I encourage all to keep a "total recall" reading record.
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