On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Bob W <[email protected]> wrote: > I agree. There are more pleasures in reading than just reading. The > physicality of the book is important.
Thanks Bob, really nicely put. All your aesthetic arguments are convincing, with the exception of weight-in-the-hand; many books are just too damn big and heavy. None of your practical ones are convincing; Annotation will be easy, libraries will work just fine, eavesdropping on what others are reading will continue, and will be a good source of pick-up lines. But the prospect of the loss of the bookstore as an institution makes my blood run cold. Still, most bookstores in most cities are pretty dismal places; the big-box operators grow rapidly worse in their selection, ambience, and staffing. The bookstores whose memory brings a smile to one's face tend to be specialty operators: the Powell's and Blackwell's of this world, or your local sci-fi or French-book emporium. Perhaps (he wrote optimistically) they'll do just fine in a world where physical books exist only to serve specialist needs. I note that any respectable city these days has some small idiosyncratic vinyl-record merchants who are doing OK while the CD retailers crash and burn, and are a lot more interesting to hang out in than when "record stores" were more mainstream. So maybe it's not, if not all good, not entirely bad. -Tim -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
