Bye Bye Bookstores

As anyone who reads this blog knows (Hi Mom!), I like to get up and devour the Wall Street Journal's Editorial Page each morning. This morning, there was an article entitled Bye Bye Bookstores by Sven Birkets. In the article, Mr. Birket's, a long time educator and bookstore employee discusses the future of bookstores in the digital age. He agrees with me. (Notice, I don't agree with him).

"Now comes the news that Barnes & Noble is putting itself up for sale. The reason? The nation's leading book retailer and its stock are getting hammered by the rapid transformation of the marketplace—bits & bytes supplanting bricks & boards. A look at profit-earnings charts from Barnes & Noble and Amazon over a five-year period reveals reversed mirror-images, with Amazon predictably ascendant. No one doubted that the process was underway, but no one seemed to reckon on the speed."

I "reckoned" on the speed.

But, we're right, bookstores are going to have a very difficult time in the very near future. They're losing their place in society. Although, the author and I agree on many aspects of the coming digital reading age, there were some passages of his editorial that I found a bit odd. I'm a huge bookstore fan, or was before I became a Kindle devotee. I even read Gone with the Wind while traveling back from Washington by hitting as many bookstores as I could. Read that whole sucker without ever buying it. It's okay though, I bought alot of coffee from their over-priced coffee stores to make up for the difference. But, as a bookstore junkie, I feel I know a bit about them and have spent a lot of time in them. So, Mr. Birket's writing the following passage is a bit ridiculous to me.

"This grieves me. This is a loss far bigger than a loss of a particular kind of access to books. It marks the effective removal of what is finally a symbolic representation. Less and less will it seem right and natural, expected and desirable, that people should gather in appealing public spaces for the sole purpose of catering to, and perhaps flaunting, their mental (their inner) lives. Less and less is it already happening that this thread unexpectedly leads to that with the counter clerk, or even another customer, suddenly blurting, "Oh, if you haven't read—" That species of retail adventure is already being replaced by preference algorithms: the Pandorification of America."

I've never had, nor do I wish to have the type of experience described above, particularly in a bookstore. I share my mental (inner) life with very few, and certainly not to strangers at the bookstore. Perhaps I secretly want bookstores to go away. Maybe a series of coffee shops all with editions of Gone with the Wind would have served me better on my road trip. Starbucks take note....invest in used books!