I was unable to drop a comment on this post by The Rejectionist, so I’m sharing it with you all instead, as well as the comment I was going to drop over yonder.
Speaking as someone who keeps telling her own blog readers she is on Book Buying Hiatus She SWEARS (and who just bought three new ebooks and four trade paperbacks), I totally feel the Rejectionist’s book hoarding pain. Because it ain’t like I don’t have enough books to occupy me reading for the rest of my natural life, what with the nearly 900 things on my To Read list! And it’s not like I can tell the entire publishing industry to take a six month hiatus so that I can get caught up please kthx AUGH so many awesome people writing awesome things!
Also, I totally envy her the Francesca Lia Blocks in that pile, because I read Primavera ages ago and very much want to read it again, and Ecstasia as well, and cannot find them for love or money.
But all this said, I am also quite charmed by the idea of leaving Secret Letters in copies of favorite books for other people to find. And I would totally leave a letter in a Barbara Michaels, an Elizabeth Peters, an Esther Friesner, a Julie Czerneda, or a Tanya Huff, as these are authors who were all formative influences on me. This is certainly one thing you can’t do with ebooks, not nearly as easily anyway–unless an author gets clever with an embedded hyperlink or something somewhere in the middle of an epub file.