Tuesday, March 9, 2010

A lament for the bookshelf


We love this article by Russell Smith writing for www.theglobeandmail.com:


In the age of the e-book, what will happen to bookshelves? How will we decorate our apartments? How will we judge our prospective partners?

I am living in the aftermath of a move, where as usual the books have been the most obstructive and expensive and dustiest element. They have been moved from student room to disastrous relationship to shared house to storage locker for 20 years now, and they have not suffered, indeed they have proliferated as they migrated, like a great nomadic herd. Many of them have traversed this vast country more than once; some have crossed an ocean. My books thrive on upheaval: It causes them to spawn.

Before every move, I perform a heartbreaking yet necessary cull. I isolate the weakest – the review copies of self-help books, the self-published novels sent to me with challenging notes, the anthologies compiled for noble charities – and I drive them to a local library or Goodwill with a guilty feeling. (Fiction is more likely to survive this cull than non-fiction, because it is less topical: All the books I bought in the nineties on “computer culture” are uninteresting except to a specialist in failed prognostications. But a novel from the nineties with a computer in it is fascinating.)

And still on every move there are 10 more boxes than there were before, and new Ikea shelves to be assembled and found space for. When I am grown up, I will have a carpenter build me bookcases of actual wood, but by then there will be no more books.

I paid movers this time, and they were dismayed but half amazed too. “Have you read all these?” asked one, and I said yes, although the truth is complicated. (I try not to store a single book that I haven’t read or am not planning to read, and yet there are some signed by friends or colleagues that are just not my kind of thing and that I can’t throw away or the universe will punish me for my ingratitude.) And I’m not even the obsessive bibliophile type: I have very few first editions, most are paperbacks, and there are very few I would not use as a coaster or doorstop. I know guys who keep their books behind smoked glass and won’t let you rest your spectacles on top of one.

So I always wonder, on every move, why I add to the cost and cut down the space in my inevitably tiny new living quarters by keeping these. People come to see my minuscule new living room and say, hmm, you could have another foot and a half without that wall of bookshelves. True, but then you would never be able to distract yourself, while waiting for me to dress, by pulling down, at random, Weapons of World War II and 100 Erotic Drawings.

But you’d probably have brought your own e-reader with you, which you’d be looking at anyway (checking Facebook, updating: “I am so mad right now”). Book-walls are just aesthetic now, just an unusually dense wallpaper: We don’t really need them for consultation. I can probably find the complete text of most of them online within an hour. It’s the same for CDs: If you have the time to copy them all, you can throw them all away and buy music online for the rest of your life. In the future, we will live in ever-smaller houses with ever-larger TV screens, so you need all the wall-space you have. And all our books will be invisible, like our music: The sum total of our literary experience will be a list of file names on a grey plastic machine in a briefcase.

This will make for much more overburdened computers and much less cluttered apartments. Bric-a-brac is generally unfashionable now. Designers see apartments full of amusing memorabilia – the matchboxes from Berlin, the Soweto tin car, all the stuff that children love – as dust-gathering and space-consuming. We no longer respect the Cabinet of Wonders as a guiding principle of decoration.

So we lose forever the pleasure known to humanity for 500 years of taking a stroll up and down the aisles of someone else’s brain by perusing their bookshelves. Gone will be the guilty joy of spending a rainy afternoon at a cottage with the remnants of someone else’s childhood: their Nancy Drews, their 1970s National Geographics. Without bookshelves, you will never know the warning signs contained in the e-reader of your handsome date – you will not know for months that he is reading The Secret and Feng Shui for Dummies, even if you stay over. You will never be able to ask, as casually as you can, “Did you like this?” as you pull down, as if fascinated, Patrick Swayze’s autobiography.

No doubt the creators of e-books will come up with an app for this: If you are a Twilight reader at a social gathering, your machine will sense the proximity of another Twilight novel in someone else’s reader and will light up with a big pulsing hot-chocolate icon. (If it’s set to Chuck Palahniuk, the beer icon lights up, and so on.) I know, technology can do all this. But it won’t be the same as good old clutter. When all our apartments are clean, I will miss the wooden skeletons from Mexico and the science-fiction from high school.

6 comments:

L. Diane Wolfe said...

Yes they take up space, but I love the eight bookshelves that occupy our house!

Taylor Trask said...

I'm all for nostalgia, and definitely understand the basis for your post. But I think the Tattered Cover is kind of blowing the ebook thing out of proportion at the moment. The market penetration FAR lower compared to the original ipod, and we really haven't had a device or user experience yet that does to books what the ipod did to music. Until that happens ebooks are still niche product for advanced users.

But even so, why doesn't the Tattered Cover use the time it has to build up a quality website with the same excellent experience that can be found in your retail store? You should be solidifying your brand online so that you can also evolve with the market. If you did it right, your online/mobile experience could actually reinforce the need to visit the store itself.

Just some food for thought.

hungry reader said...

Thank you for your thoughts on this, Taylor. Good to get your feedback. We would love to have a cutting edge website developed but, as are many independent bookstores around the country, ours is tied to Indiebound.org and all development is done by them. They are working to make improvements as they hear from subscribers. At present we neither have the expertise in house nor the capitol to pay an outside developer to create our dream website but we do give our suggestions to the developers at Indiebound, as do all the other stores, and they're trying to accommodate.

But to your earlier point, let us say that we hadn't realized we were sounding so negative when passing on articles like this about ebooks and your feedback is a wake-up call. We do sell e-books for e-readers other than the Kindle and intend to embrace new technologies where we can. We'll try to be more conscious of sounding so dreadful in the future. We know that survival requires the ability to change and we intend to adapt and prosper.

Thanks again for the heads-up. We really do appreciate it.

Taylor Trask said...

Thanks for being receptive! Just out of curiosity, why do you have to be "tied" to indiebound? I would think of all the entities in town Tattered Cover could do the most for exposing local authors and driving recommendations, etc through your own site.

Taylor Trask said...

I wanted to also follow up by saying I feel VERY strongly that in today's marketplace, your online brand is just as if not MORE important than your physical store. There kind of has to come a point where you make the same investment there as you would in keeping your physical location in order.

(And please note, I'm in no way trying to solicit business, just point you in the right direction so you can survive and THRIVE as the economics change. I already lost one bookstore I loved, I'd hate to lose y'all.)

hungry reader said...

We appreciate the conversation and certainly agree with you that attention must be paid to our online presence as we look ahead. However, in the current economic climate, our financial resources are more limited than ever before and we simply cannot invest right now. Indiebound is an organization that supports us (and many other independents) by bearing some of the cost of having an online presence and we in turn support them as they give us collective influence & resources with other booksellers around the country.

Indiebound does not create the content on our website or for any other bookstore, just the inventory capabilities (which are uniquely complex when dealing in books) & the purchasing functions of the site, as well as the Drupal templates. We do control what we're promoting, discussing & sharing with our customers at our end--completely. We just can't add new functions or design elements that aren't already in place. Perhaps if the economy recovers and business looks up, we'll be able to invest in developing a new website but right now it's just not an option.