Books, books, books.

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THE paper tells me that NBC will be offering its programs on demand via Amazon, after a deal with Apple fell through. This is the inevitable, even too-late, step after TiVo. The TV series, the weekly ritual of my black-and-white youth, recurring like little seasons, has broken up into on-demand bits. So television joins the stream of Internet content, into which no man steps twice.

But the first interactive on-demand information system, before computers, before even electricity, was rolled out in Scribes 3.0--the page. Scribes 1.0 was cuneiform written on tablets; Scribes 2.0 was the scroll. But, while tablets could be shuffled, they were essentially rocks, and while scrolls were made of parchment, they could not be shuffled, only unrolled. With the hand-lettered page, both lightweight and flappable, we entered a new universe. Ucbald in his monastery could skip to the end of an Apocalypse, to find out if God saved the day at last; or he could read it backwards; or he could read the same page 20 times (necessary perhaps if he was newly literate). Gutenberg 1.0 mechanized the process. Gnomes in a hundred laboratories have been trying to invent the e-book that will be as useful and pleasant as the printed page, but they haven't done it yet.

What the e-book, even in its ugly infancy, has already done, however, is solve the storage problem of its incarnate predecessor. I am acutely aware of this problem because my office has just moved--forcing me to move my books.

This is a problem that afflicts the city today. One scene in The Age of Innocence showed Newland Archer in his library opening a crate of newly ordered books. Not in 21st-century Manhattan, Oldland. The "library" of my apartment consists of three shelves at ceiling level (in a hallway, over a bathroom door, and over a window); wooden boards supported by brackets flanking another window; and a piece of furniture from a Greek place on Sixth Avenue beside the dining-room table (which, of course, is in the dining "angle," not the dining "room"). The Age of Innocence sits on the last-named piece (between the German Ideology and a book of essays edited by David Brooks). Given my addiction to reading and my resistance to parting, these spaces were soon filled; my equivalent of the Gilded Age library had to be my office. One day I went to K-Mart, bought a U-Build-It bookshelf, and shlepped the timber to Murray Hill; the cabbie kindly let the ends stick out of his rolled-down windows like fetal wings. The books on those shelves were the hoard that had to be moved.

Inattention is a great saving force; what we ignore we live with. But upheaval can be liberating. George Orwell said he was glad the Library of Alexandria burned: less work for him at Eton. Now that I had to box and unbox, I also had to think, and choose. These were books, remember, that, while I had not wanted to get rid of them, I did not feel I needed at home. They were in an intermediate state--not purgatory, exactly, for all the souls in purgatory are saved. What did I save, and what did I winnow?

I saved parts of me. My college yearbooks preserve pictures of me wearing the medal of the Chairman of the Party of the Right, and wearing the white tie of my singing group. I could do without the pictures of me wearing the mustache I had in the Burt Reynolds years, but the past, unlike the page, cannot be manipulated. I saved books that are tools. I own the Political Correspondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr, edited by Mary-Jo Kline. One reason I own it is that it is so short (two volumes). "One combs it in vain," wrote Burr's biographer Milton Lomask, "for so much as a single sentence that can be cited as pointing to a political philosophy." I saved books that represent old loyalties. I went through a John Updike phase in the early Reagan years, and my collection of his works is almost as complete as my collection of Burr's. The brands not plucked out of the burning include betrayed loyalties: My Updike collection is now smaller by The Centaur, and several books of reviews. I disposed of obsolete tools. I let go a book on modern Mexican-American immigrants. The issue has grown much hotter in the 15 years since the book was published, which paradoxically makes it old hat: So much more happens every day. I have simultaneously become more interested in the Mexican War--not, I hope, an antiquary's dodge, but following the story upriver. The toughest cases were autographed copies. Eminent acquaintance gave me a coffee-table book; I never imagined I would read it, and he is now dead. Farewell. Former friend gave me an academic book. I never read it either, and the friendship is dead. But he was at my wedding. Stay a while.

I understand there are cities where the space crunch is even worse than Manhattan. One of the many characters in David Lodge's Small World (a home book, not an office one; it sits on a stack atop Witness and the Encyclopedia of Turtles) is a Japanese translator of modern English fiction. He jokes about the titles the Japanese used to attach to Shakespeare plays (The Strange Affair of the Flesh and the Bosom was The Merchant of Venice). He lives in Tokyo in a cubicle in which he is unable to stand upright.

The keepers have come out of their boxes, and sit on the carpet, awaiting new shelves. Some publisher meanwhile has sent me a sleek fat history of Protestantism. Will it stay? How long? I find discarded, discolored paperbacks in the mail room, on the street: The Words (Jean-Paul Sartre); The Compassionate Buddha (Buddha). The urban/literary cycle--part commuting, part food distribution, part waste removal--begins again.