In
recent years, pundits have been lamenting the loss of the neighborhood
bookstore in America. In a PBS interview on 21 July 2011, Jeffrey Brown spoke
with Slate’s Annie Lowrey. They
talked about the emerging eBook markets, the mistakes Border’s made, the
changing landscape of literacy. And then this:
BROWN: And their corner
bookstore is now gone.
LOWREY: They have fewer and fewer
choices in that sense, it is true.
In October 2011, cartoonist
Tom Batiuk addressed the issue in his Funky
Winkerbean strip. The character named Crazy is about to enter the Village Booksmith
when he notices the sign: GOING OUT OF
BUSINESS taped to the window. Over several days Crazy has flashbacks to his
boyhood when he bought Tarzan books there. But the owner now tells him that a
bookstore is now more like an antique shop.
In late January 2012, the New York Times ran a long feature piece—“The
Bookstore’s Last Stand” (by Julie Bosman)—about publishers’ worries about the
emerging eBook business, the domination of Amazon, the fragility of the country’s
final big book chain, Barnes & Noble. Bosman spoke with William J. Lynch,
Jr., B&N’s CEO, who said, “Our stores are not going anywhere.” (We’ll see!)
Recent research, by the
way, is showing that readers of physical books retain more, are moved more,
than are readers of eBooks. And surveys of college students show that they
prefer actual books for their classes.[1] Still, it’s unlikely the
eBook business will go away. Convenience is a powerful factor in modern life.
I have had several Kindles
and use them, mostly, for reading thrillers and other snack-food fare. I have
tried to read scholarly books on them but have found I much prefer a physical book for that purpose. I’ve sometimes used
Kindle, too, for my book reviewing—not for the new book but for the author’s
previous titles. But I find that somehow dissatisfying, too. I’d rather hold an
actual text in my hand.
I realized, of course, that all of this could be
just an older man’s preference for older technology. My dad, who died in 1999,
for example, didn’t ever use a cellphone, didn’t like the ATM and would always
go to the drive-thru—or actually enter the bank—to cash a check or make a
deposit. And I can not see my father
in an automated check-out line at the grocery store. Even a fresh jar of
dry-roasted peanuts (his favorite) was not worth learning some newfangled purchase
process.
But William Godwin (1756–1836)
lived in a much different time. Newspapers, pamphlets, books, magazines—all
flooded London with ink, buried the city in pages. And people read and read and
read. He could have never dreamed that the whole enterprise would one day slouch
not towards Bethlehem but towards the City of the Dead.
[1]
See: Naomi S. Baron, Words Onscreen: The Fate
of Reading in a Digital World (New York: Oxford UP, 2015).
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