Powell’s Books is shuttering its South Loop location. The Chicago Symphony’s CSO-paraphernalia/music gift/CD store the Symphony Store is moving into Symphony Center. Tower Records already closed all of its stores, the Virgin Store is no more, and places where you can idle away hours rifling through CD racks and perusing shelves are getting scarcer by the day. The merchandise is 50 per cent off at both of them now, so get there while you still can. I made out like a bandit at Powell’s last week, picking up books by Jonathan Raban, Jonathan Lethem, John Haskell, Peter Matthiessen, and theater critic/raconteur/one of the greatest writers ever Kenneth Tynan (above) for $18.32.
And I’m still bothered by it. I’ve never bought anything recommended by an Amazon.com algorithm. The choice thing from its perspective is usually something from a major record label or publisher or author I already knew was out there. No algorithm has ever found something not at all related yet still exactly right the way going through the fiction section alphabetically at a book store – the only way to do it – has for me, consistently and accurately. There may be an untold number of riches online, but online shopping hasn’t yet gotten to the point where a browser (by which I mean a person, not the tool to get you on the Internet) can stumble on something they wanted but didn’t know it yet. For that, a bookstore and a record store are still unbeatable.
I say this as a devoted abebooks.com shopper. Believe me, if there’s something out there that’s pricey and somewhat rare or out-of-print and hard to find, I’m online before I’m anywhere. But it only works if I know what I want.
Fashionable yet down-to-earth model showing how pleasing Kindle-reading can be
I like the sense of chance of a store. I’ll miss it when it’s gone. I don’t want to read on a Kindle, regardless of how much easier it will make dusting and moving apartments. Moving doesn’t happen so often, and neither, for that matter, does dusting. I love having my music all in the palm of my hand, but I also like the sense of ownership I get from having it on a shelf somewhere, and not a hard drive where it could disappear. I don’t think I’d want to scan through a list of books stored on my Kindle, and try to remember back to when I bought them, and try to find the sentences I underlined because they seemed important at the time. When I look on the shelf, I can place the book in time, possibly because I can place the thing in physical space.
Ephemerality is the enemy. I like stuff that lasts.
I like being in the record store, hearing what the clerk has on, and saying that I’ll take it, too, at the cash register. Knowing that someone thought the people who would be in this store on this day should hear this, that’s an experience I like. I like the sense of community it fosters. So, if you’re looking for me, you can find this 31-going-on-78-year old in the bookstore, grumbling about kids and their Twindles or Kitters or whatever they’re using these days.
But seriously, I think this is the direction reading is headed. This well-reported Fast Company article states it all pretty plainly: Amazon is looking to crowd publishers out of publishing, and get everyone using Kindles. But a tangent of the article goes into what’s lost when reading on a screen, thanks to a quote from Oxford University Press’s Evan Schnittman, vice president of global business development:
“I love to read but I know I read immersively somewhat less now — and I’m in the publishing industry,” he says. “E-books are simply print books in digital form and my question is, Will that be enough? Is that really what we’re going to want to be doing?”
The loss of the “immersive reading experience,” as FC‘s Adam L. Penenberg calls it, is going to radically redefine how we learn, and how we read, and how we ultimately store information. Reading and thinking about what you’re reading files it away, and if you’re not engaged…I don’t know that that’s learning anymore.
As for me, I have a sky to go worry about whether it’s falling, and a small stack of literature to tide me over until it does.