From: Tim Bray
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.
For the past 10 years or so, I've been involved in a folk music circle;
a bunch of guitar players, banjo players and the occasional drummer,
bongo player and key-boardist who meet every Tuesday night for a couple
of hours to play and sing. Missed 'em for a couple of years while I was
mobilized, but they carried on without me.
We meet in one of those "big-box" bookstores. They make room for us in
their coffee-shop. It used to be a Borders until they remodeled their
coffee shop and no longer had room for us, but Books-a-Million took us in.
Interesting place. After one session I decided to see if I could snag a
movie on DVD to take home. They didn't have any movies on DVD ... just
lots and lots of books and magazines. (They do now have one small
portable rack of classic movies on DVD)
OTOH, sad news about the best bookstore I've ever known.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/durham/story/1384491.html
This place was a fixture in my home town since before I was born and
certainly for as long as I can remember. I went to that same high school
mentioned in the article and passed the store everyday ... and
frequently stopped to dawdle there a while.
I bought my first John Shaw nature photography book there.
I don't think the place was a victim of the dying of books though. The
city of Durham, NC managed to kill their downtown with their urban
renewal projects.
I saw it coming when I was a teenager; they were tearing down buildings
to build parking garages. But while they made parking convenient, the
business's that needed the parking moved away to the shopping malls ...
or just closed down because their customers stopped coming when they
couldn't get through the construction delays.
Still, The Book Exchange managed to hang on for another 40 years after
everyone else was gone.
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