Yeah, the scarcity of books is awful.

But one of the things I've been getting into lately is this gut feeling that our reverence and worship of books-as-objects over the contents is problematic.

Books don't have any inherent meaning until we imbue that meaning. It's the text, the illustrations, which can exist separately that we read meaning into. And, frankly, if you're stuck on the side of the road and have to change a flat, sitting on a nice thick bible or collection of shakespeare is preferable to getting bits of glass and tiny rocks cutting into your legs, if your emergency blanket and towel are in use. Plus, those thin pages are good for lots of other uses...

(This is why I keep a Pelican Complete Shakespeare in my trunk. Not only does it provide reading material that is always useful, but it's a good 8 inches thick so I can use it to prop things up or sit on or whatever. Haven't torn any pages out yet, but I'm not averse to doing so if necessary.)