I am one of those people who truly love books. I don't just mean reading them. I love the feel of a book in my hand, and even the musty smell that old books acquire. I like collecting books, sorting them, and arranging them artistically on my book shelves.
One long wall of the family room is filled with books, from floor to ceiling, arranged by subject area, and then alphabetically within each subgroup. And woe to the person who doesn't put a book back where it belongs!
There are books everywhere in the house: in my bedroom, the kids' bedroom, stacked on coffee tables in the living room. You only need to walk through my front door, and the first thing you notice on your left is an open bookshelf that contains stacks of books I have checked out from my local library.
It's an obsession long in the making. I remember my first trip to Manhattan with my mother and how we walked to 5th Avenue to visit Brentano's, an independent book seller, now sadly defunct after a merger with Waldenbooks and later Border's. Cheap paperbacks were a new phenomenon for me, and at 75 cents or so a piece, my acquisitiveness was limited only by what I could carry. I proudly walked out with a stack of books that reached up to my chin and spent most of the remaining vacation devouring them.
When I was ten or eleven, my sleep overs at one friend's house were the occasion for “read outs.” This is what we called our midnight excursions into a lighted hallway to read (or keep reading) a favorite book when we were supposed to be in bed. I read Pride and Prejudice cover to cover in that hallway and then re-read it so many times, it literally disintegrated.
So I took a considerably jaundiced view of the Kindle and other e-readers when they first came on the market.. My husband bought one for his parents so they could easily increase the type size and avoid eye strain. Then he gave me one for Christmas. I loved the white background, which was much closer to real paper than a computer screen, and the miniature reading light that you could pull out, which meant that you could still read at night. He had even bought a red cover for it so that it looked more like a Moleskin journal than an electronic device.
After a few weeks or so, my husband looked at my unused Kindle collecting dust on my nightstand next to a stack of books and asked me in wounded tones, “Why aren't you reading your Kindle?'
How could I explain without hurting his feelings? Reading a Kindle in bed was just not the same as holding a book in my hands. “Well, I have all these books to read first,” I told him, giving him the first excuse I could think of.
It wasn't until we traveled to Barcelona last year that I discovered the Kindle's guilty pleasures. Instead of lugging a stack of paperbacks with me to be discarded in hotel lobbies, I had nearly 20 books loaded on my little machine. It was even better when I went out sight-seeing with my son and clicked open the guidebook I had downloaded. I could look up any museum, find a local restaurant, and negotiate the metro, all without unfolding maps, or awkwardly leafing through pages. Now when I travel, I always take my Kindle with me (although I still pack a few books as well).
But I do feel a certain trepidation every time I purchase a book for my Kindle. If the Kindle were just a new form of technology, like getting a mobile phone in addition to a land line, or replacing LPs with compact disks, I wouldn't feel so guilty. But it's the combined power of this new technology and Amazon's domination of (and attitude towards) the book trade that gives me pause. After all, Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO allegedly declared that bookstores and the physical book are dead, and Amazon is probably as much bent on becoming the online competitor to Wal-Mart as it is in becoming the world's biggest bookseller.
Not only are Amazon's Kindle books much cheaper than their hardcover or paperback versions, but since Amazon is selling its Kindle Fire for less than it costs to make, many in the publishing business worry that Amazon could eventually control what gets published. As one publisher put it, "Get market share, and when you get far ahead it is hard to catch up. Bezo's game, like Jobs's before him, is to get the device and get eighty-to-ninety-percent distribution on the device, and you own the game," (quoted in an article in The New Yorker)
I don't subscribe to the doomsday scenarios of e-readers like the Kindle “wrecking the publishing industry,” but having watched Border's go bankrupt, and my local independent bookstores scaling back the number of volumes they carry, it does give me pause. Am I contributing to the demise of the bookstore as we know it?
According to a Harris Poll taken late in 2010, the answer is maybe. The ownership of e-readers is increasing at a phenomenal rate, but when people buy them, it seems to have either a neutral or positive effect on the number of books they read and on the number of books they purchase. This is encouraging news for someone like me who is still clinging to the pleasures of browsing bookstore shelves. Scrolling through Amazon's recommendations is not the same as the serendipity of finding a title that intrigues you because it happens to be next to the book you're actually looking for.
So I try to visit my local bookstore more frequently and not feel disappointed because there are fewer volumes to browse. What I fear most is that bookstores will go the way of Tower Records or the record shop which have disappeared as the majority of people download music from the web. It's hard to purchase a music CD these days except at stores like Wal-Mart and Target where they're just one more consumable item. I don't go to bookstores to consume. I go there to enjoy the experience of looking at books just as much as I go there with the intention to buy one.
Of course, with my shelves overflowing at home, it might be better if I did slow down my physical acquisition of books. But somehow I don't anticipate that I will. The Kindle is still just a machine to me. You can't give a Kindle to a toddler and let her chew on it as well as read it, the way you do with board books. Nor can you cuddle up with a Kindle at bedtime and let your child turn the pages as you read aloud. Books carry memories of afternoons spent curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea, and associations with the people who read to me when I was a child. For me, books are a lifelong love affair as well an obsession, and I don't anticipate a break up any time soon.
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